Rubio says the US government did not facilitate Bolsonaro’s flight to the US

ATLANTA (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Saturday that the Trump administration did not facilitate defeated presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro’s departure to the U.S. after he left Brazil following his election defeat to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Bolsonaro arrived in Miami on Wednesday, a day after the State Department said that Bolsonaro and his family will be granted U.S. visas after his weekend loss in a hotly contested race that bucked a trend of conservative electoral results in Latin America.

“We didn’t facilitate anything,” Rubio told reporters in Atlanta, where top diplomats from the Group of 20 largest world economies were gathered.

“We had word that he had arrived in the United States. He had previously held a visa, and the president made a decision to allow him to enter the country,” Rubio said, adding that the U.S. government was not “involved directly in any of the moves that were made.”

Rubio also said that he had seen Brazil’s foreign minister, Mauro Vieira, in Atlanta both on Friday and Saturday, and that he expected to see Brazilian officials again in France in November, when France is hosting a foreign ministers’ meeting.

Bolsonaro refused to concede and has called the elections fraudulent, without providing evidence. His father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, also refused to acknowledge his 2022 loss to Lula and is serving a 27-year sentence for attempting a coup.

Bolsonaro, who had President Donald Trump’s tacit support in the election, is under investigation for corruption, money laundering and tax evasion in Brazil and had been ordered to surrender his passport after police deemed him a flight risk.

The senator from Rio de Janeiro, who will lose his seat when Brazil’s new legislature begins on Feb. 1, repeated his claim that he is a victim of persecution in a livestream on Instagram Friday.

In a letter on Wednesday, the 45-year-old Bolsonaro declared himself the “true president-elect of Brazil” — a term he later softened to “leader.” He compared himself — among other figures — to Charles de Gaulle, who led the French resistance to the Nazi occupation of France from London during World War II.