By Ricardo Luiz
Brazilian Senator Flávio Bolsonaro says his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, made a mistake when he returned to Brazil in March 2023, after three months in the United States. In an interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald, the senator also said he does not intend to repeat the move. He remains in the U.S. with no date to come back.
“He believed he would have one”
Flávio explained what, in his view, led his father to board the flight home.
“He came back because he thought he would get a fair process. In my opinion, I knew he wouldn’t, and he believed he would,” the senator said.
The remark is not a personal criticism of his father. It is a judgment about the country’s institutional environment. Flávio says his reading of the situation was more realistic, and that this is what separates the two strategies.
Leaving Brazil despite an order from Moraes
According to Flávio’s account, he left Brazil on October 27, two days after the elections. At the time, there was an order from Justice Alexandre de Moraes of the Supreme Federal Court (STF), Brazil’s highest court, requiring him to surrender his passports and barring him from leaving the country.
The senator says the summons reached him as he was leaving Jair Bolsonaro’s home in Brasília. The former president witnessed the encounter and was moved.
Flávio said his father only told him: “You know where they want to get to, right?” The senator interprets the phrase as an acknowledgment that the situation could end in prison.
Legality and a mandate from abroad
The senator maintains that he acted within the law. He said he used his national ID card to leave Brazil and his passport to enter the United States.
On a return, he set no deadline: “as long as things remain as they are in Brazil, I don’t see favorable conditions.”
Flávio also says he will not give up his seat. He plans to carry out his parliamentary duties virtually and follow Senate sessions remotely.
What comes next
It is not yet known how the Supreme Court and the Senate will treat a senator who works from a distance and who, according to the order cited, was barred from leaving the country. The answer could shape the next steps in the dispute between the senator and Moraes.
Background: why it matters
Jair Bolsonaro was Brazil’s president from 2019 to 2022. Flávio, his son, is a senator and one of the best-known figures of the Brazilian right. The case puts a member of the country’s most prominent conservative family in open conflict with a Supreme Court justice, and raises the question of how a senator can exercise his mandate from abroad.
VDD Analysis
Flávio’s remarks expose a distrust that many Brazilians share: that due process does not apply equally to everyone when the target is the right. It is up to the institutions to show, with transparency and respect for individual rights, that this perception is wrong. Until that happens, episodes like this one will keep fueling the debate over freedom and legal certainty in the country.
