MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

“True president”, then “leader”: Bolsonaro’s letter from the United States

In the letter, Bolsonaro says he did not flee but refused to submit to “political persecution” and judicial harassment

Brazilian Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who arrived in Miami on Wednesday after leaving Brazil despite a court ban, released a letter in which he presented himself as “the true president-elect of Brazil”, alleged “electoral fraud” without evidence and thanked Argentine President Javier Milei for his “courage”. About 30 minutes later the text was changed and Bolsonaro described himself instead as Brazil’s “leader”.

“I address the Brazilian people and the international community as the true president-elect of Brazil. First of all, I want to thank President Milei for his courage, his sense of justice and legality, and President Trump and the wonderful American people for welcoming me,” the first version read, shared by commentator Paulo Figueiredo and by the senator’s allies. According to the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, the text went through three versions. The first carried the coat of arms of the “Estados Unidos do Brazil”, which fell out of use in 1968, and was later corrected.

In the letter, Bolsonaro says he did not flee but refused to submit to “political persecution” and judicial harassment, and accuses Supreme Court Judge Cristiano Zanin, whom he calls “Lula’s former lawyer”, of making possible “a mathematical impossibility” by extending voting hours: that Lula gained more than ten million votes between the first and second rounds. The president went from 53.9 million votes on October 4 to 64.2 million on Sunday, in an election in which both campaigns focused on mobilising the roughly 33 million voters who abstained in the first round. The head of the Superior Electoral Court, Kassio Nunes Marques, appointed by the senator’s father, said on Monday that the extension did not alter the result.

Bolsonaro says he will lead the opposition from the United States and compares his departure with those of Charles de Gaulle, Rui Barbosa, José Martí, Juan Guaidó, Edmundo González and María Corina Machado. The State Department has granted visas to him and his family. President Donald Trump said on Monday that the Brazilian election “looked like another rigged election”.

Argentina’s National Migration Directorate confirmed that Bolsonaro entered the country via the Tancredo Neves bridge at Puerto Iguazú on Tuesday night, with valid documents and “without any legal impediment”, before flying to Miami on a private plane. The letter does not specify what the thanks to Milei refers to, and the Argentine government, which has also not congratulated Lula on his re-election, had not commented on it. Bolsonaro is under investigation at the Supreme Court for alleged money laundering, which he denies.