The flight of far-right Brazilian politician Flávio Bolsonaro has exposed covert support from the Donald Trump administration and a network of alliances among conservative governments on the continent, encouraged by Washington, that collaborated to enable his escape. Bolsonaro’s departure for Miami — just one day after insisting he would lead the opposition to the newly re-elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — demonstrates the existence of a Latin American bloc not only ideologically aligned with Trump but willing to act according to his logic, disregarding international treaties, several analysts said.

“It’s a network behaving identically to Trump’s, where international law has no relevance. The U.S. administration feels no respect for it and the Bolsonaro case is further proof. This creates a contagion effect among his regional allies, who choose to ignore legality. Trump sets the pattern and his allies avoid any decision that might anger him: they are aligned and follow the policy he defines,” says Michael Shifter, former president of the Inter-American Dialogue and one of Washington’s most influential hemispheric policy analysts.

Shortly after returning to the White House for his second term, Trump infused the federal administration with his particular geopolitical vision — a view that seeks to restore U.S. preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, according to the National Security Strategy published by the Pentagon late last year. The Defense Department’s new plan aims to reinstate the Monroe Doctrine, named for U.S. President James Monroe, who in the early 19th century formulated the idea of “America for the Americans,” an ideology that consolidated U.S. hegemony across the Americas and encouraged interference and intervention in Latin American countries.

The strategy has found backing among his allies. A few months before Brazil’s election, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro — who was sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a coup after the 2022 elections — visited Trump in the Oval Office, an unusual move for a candidate. There, according to U.S. media reports, they agreed that Trump would not publicly endorse Bolsonaro because it could be counterproductive, but in recent months the U.S. president has made things difficult for the Lula da Silva government. And now he has welcomed Flávio in his country.

The fact that the United States, under Trump’s leadership, allowed Flávio Bolsonaro to flee Brazil — where he is under investigation for corruption cases, including money laundering — sets a dangerous precedent in the region, Michael Shifter says. “Everything Trump does sets a precedent,” he notes. “There’s a long list of unprecedented acts, and this is a very worrying precedent because it shows there is no regard for any law, regulation or court order,” he explains.

The occupant of the White House has meddled in every presidential election held in the region over the past two years to favor the most conservative candidates. Trump openly backed Argentina’s Javier Milei in last year’s legislative elections. Washington facilitated a $20 billion financial rescue to sustain the Argentine currency during a period of financial turbulence. And without much hesitation it conditioned that aid on the populist Argentine’s electoral victory.

Imposing the Monroe Doctrine

It was the clearest example of interventionism, although Trump also meddled in other elections through explicit messages of support on his social network, Truth, designed to favor right-wing hopefuls aligned with his cause. He publicly backed Nasry Asfura in Honduras. He also staged his “full support” for Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia’s presidential race. Over the last two years, Trump has kept the carousel of endorsements going with Keiko Fujimori in Peru, Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia, and Laura Fernández in Costa Rica. Last November he declared his support for far-right José Antonio Kast to become Chile’s next president.

All these new conservative allies signed an agreement to create the so-called Shield of the Americas, an association of American countries to fight drug trafficking and organized crime. Trump staged the founding of the new organization last March at Doral (Miami), in a summit attended by a large representation of leaders who bowed to the U.S. leader’s dictates. The Shield of the Americas, however, is also a Washington instrument to cement its new foreign policy toward Latin America: under a neocolonial vision dubbed the “Donroe doctrine,” a play on James Monroe’s strategy combined with Donald Trump’s name.

Since Trump returned to the Oval Office two years ago, this strategy has forged an alliance with Latin America’s conservative presidents, showing favoritism and at times disparaging their rivals.

The political shift in the region is evident. A total of 17 allied, right-leaning countries have joined the Shield of the Americas founded by the United States. In the region, practically only Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Cuba are governed by leftist parties. Although Trump did not publicly back Flávio Bolsonaro in Brazil’s presidential race, he maneuvered to favor him.

That alignment enabled Bolsonaro’s unpunished exit from Brazil, evading Brazilian law. Katya Salazar, director of the Due Process of Law Foundation (DPLF), an organization that promotes human rights and the rule of law in Latin America, criticizes the support provided by the governments of Argentina’s Javier Milei and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa in facilitating the senator’s escape; late Tuesday night he crossed the land border into Argentina by vehicle with his wife and two daughters. At 11.30 p.m. (local time), the family boarded a private flight operated by Baires Fly S.A. bound for Guayaquil that departed after midnight.

“Argentina and Ecuador’s support for Bolsonaro’s departure is especially troubling because there were explicit judicial restrictions preventing him from leaving the country. Ideological affinity weighed more than respect for justice,” Salazar says. “This kind of solidarity between governments is not exclusive to one political sector; we have seen it across the ideological spectrum. But precisely for that reason, we must insist on a basic principle: political affinity cannot justify evading the law or disregarding court rulings,” she adds. “The precedent is awful for the Americas, especially in a context where the United States plays an increasingly active role in backing like-minded leaders. Accepting these behaviors means normalizing a logic where alliances prevail over institutions. The region cannot afford that,” she warns.

Internal fractures

Both Ecuador and Argentina are part of the Shield of the Americas. For Michael Shifter, the bloc shows severe fissures despite the firmness of its rhetoric and joint maneuvers such as Bolsonaro’s flight. “The electoral result in Brazil was a very heavy blow to Trump’s policy toward Latin America and to his ambitions of showing a fully aligned region,” he says. “The two largest economies in the area, which account for more than half the population and the largest GDP, are now on the other side. That trend toward automatic alignment is going through a very complicated moment,” he argues.

Added to that is the fact that governments such as those of Chile, Argentina and Ecuador face serious internal problems that suffocate their leaders: from the uncontrolled wave of violence besieging Noboa, to the low popularity levels of Chile’s José Antonio Kast or Peru’s Keiko Fujimori, who has just assumed the presidency with severe political wear.

“You can see the consolidation of a bloc sympathetic to Trump, willing to operate outside traditional legal parameters, but at the same time it is a bloc weakened by each country’s internal circumstances, which raises doubts about the sustainability of that alignment,” Shifter explains. At the social level, polls also reflect a deterioration in the image of the United States compared with a more favorable perception of China.

“The relationship with Washington is complex. It is true that these leaders maintain loyalty to Republican leadership, but they also know the political map in Washington could be reconfigured after the midterm elections, which would alter their calculations,” Shifter warns. A possible weakening of Trump at the ballot box would directly affect dynamics with his Latin American partners. “Trump will keep a lot of power, but not the same. And that matters for the historic tutelary relationship the United States has with the region,” he concludes.

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The plane carrying Flávio Bolsonaro and his family landed in Miami, Florida, on Wednesday morning. The Brazilian senator arrived at Opa-locka Executive Airport, north of Miami, at 9:20 a.m., after fleeing Brazil less than two days after losing the Brazilian presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Bolsonaro arrived in Florida after promising he would remain in Brazil to lead the opposition to Lula. Before leaving the country, he failed to comply with an order from Brazil’s Supreme Court requiring him to surrender his passports. On Tuesday, the administration of Donald Trump announced that it would issue visas for Bolsonaro, his wife and their two daughters.

Tuesday was marked by a series of confusing and self-serving accounts, with no one certain of Bolsonaro’s whereabouts. Earlier in the day, Argentina’s immigration authorities denied that he had entered the country, which was true at the time: he had not yet crossed the border.

Bolsonaro entered Argentina at 10:50 p.m. that night with his wife and two daughters, crossing via the Tancredo Neves International Bridge, which links Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, with Puerto Iguazú, Argentina. The crossing was later confirmed by Argentina’s immigration agency in a statement issued at 2 a.m.

Barely 40 minutes after crossing the border, the family was on board a Gulfstream G400 operated by Baires Fly, which had been waiting at Puerto Iguazú airport since Monday.

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, regarded as the Bolsonaro family’s chief adversary, had ordered the cancellation of Flávio Bolsonaro’s Brazilian passports and the surrender of his Italian passport, which he obtained in 2023.

According to the flight manifest, Bolsonaro crossed the border using his European passport, while his wife and daughters travelled on Brazilian passports. The aircraft took off shortly after midnight for Guayaquil, Ecuador. It landed there before dawn, refuelled and departed again half an hour later, according to the newspaper El Universo.

Flávio Bolsonaro is under investigation by Brazil’s Supreme Court on suspicion of money laundering and foreign-exchange evasion alongside his friend Willer Tomaz, a lawyer with business interests in the betting industry. Federal Police investigators suspect the senator is Tomaz’s silent partner. According to Folha de S.Paulo, Bolsonaro at one point had administrative access to a bank account belonging to a Tomaz company registered in Madeira, and the two men share addresses, travel records and business associates. Both deny any wrongdoing.

Bolsonaro’s stopovers were not accidental. Javier Milei’s Argentina is the Bolsonaro family’s closest ally in the region and has yet to recognize Lula’s election victory. “There will be no statement,” Milei’s government said. In July, at the launch of Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign in São Paulo, Milei referred to Lula as a “convict” and a “thief,” prompting Brazil to summon its ambassador in Buenos Aires for consultations.

Daniel Noboa’s Ecuador, meanwhile, is one of Donald Trump’s closest partners in Latin America and, by extension, an ally of the Bolsonaros. Neither Argentina’s presidency nor Baires Fly immediately responded to requests for comment.

Bolsonaro’s decision to leave Brazil comes after a defeat that neither he nor his supporters had expected. Although he finished ahead of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the first round on October 4, Lula staged a comeback to win Sunday’s runoff with 51.79% of the vote, compared with 48.21% for Bolsonaro. It was an unprecedented turnaround in Brazil’s democratic history.

Flávio Bolsonaro did not concede defeat, but hours later insisted he had never intended to leave the country and would instead lead the opposition against the left. His Senate term expires at the end of the year and, after 24 years in politics, he will no longer hold elected office. Without a seat in Congress, he will also lose the legal protections afforded to officeholders.

What Bolsonaro plans to do in the United States remains unclear, but the path has already been paved. The country has become a political rear base for the Bolsonaro family. His father, Jair Bolsonaro, flew to Orlando two days before leaving office in December 2022 and spent three months there while his supporters stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace in Brasília. His brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, has lived in Texas since early 2025 and, from there, lobbied the Trump administration to impose tariffs on Brazil and sanctions on Moraes. Brazil’s Supreme Court later sentenced Eduardo Bolsonaro to four years and two months in prison over those efforts.

The Trump administration has made its support clear. His administration appointed a Brazil adviser close to the Bolsonaro family and has now opened the door to the son who was expected to inherit the Bolsonaro political movement.

On Monday, less than 24 hours after Brazil’s election, Trump publicly questioned the result. “It looked like another rigged election, frankly,” the Republican president told reporters. “I didn’t take sides, but it was a terrible look for the world.”

Trump, who faces pivotal elections of his own in less than a week and has already sown doubts about the process, went on to add: “Elections have to be indisputable, and it looked really bad to me.”

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