Brazilian investigators are widening their hunt for the people behind Flávio Bolsonaro’s disappearance. Federal police are now looking at whether operatives from the United States, Argentina and Israel helped the defeated presidential candidate leave the country, The Washington Post reported, quoting an unnamed senior official.
The senator was never supposed to be able to travel. Alexandre de Moraes, a judge on the country’s top court, had demanded both of his passports, the regular one and the diplomatic one, and forbidden any trip abroad. Two inquiries hang over him: one concerns suspected money laundering through betting platforms, the other the funding of “Dark Horse”, a film about his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro. He denies wrongdoing.
Even so, on October 27 he, his wife and their two daughters reached Argentina by road. Security cameras caught two vans rolling across the bridge that links Foz do Iguaçu with Puerto Iguazú; a former local councillor drove one of them, his son the other. Police say there is no record of the family passing any Brazilian immigration post.
Reports in the Brazilian press describe an Israeli man, said to be a former Mossad officer, riding in the senator’s van. Argentine paperwork shows Bolsonaro being logged as an arrival three times within 34 minutes, first on an Italian passport. A chartered business jet then carried the family via a refuelling stop in Ecuador to a small airport near Miami. The charter operator put the price of the trip at 150,000 dollars.
Brazil’s foreign ministry has already summoned an Argentine diplomat to explain. Investigators stress that no direct role by the governments of Javier Milei or Donald Trump has been proven. Their next questions are who paid for the trip, and whether the court should freeze the senator’s assets.
