I had this fantasy as a kid that started with me giving an impressive performance on “Wheel of Fortune.” I’d smoke the other contestants under the watchful eye of a suitably wowed Pat Sajak, crucially solving the prize puzzle and winning the grand prize of seemingly every game show: a vacation package built around “a trip to sunny Florida.”

I’d ride the free plane ticket home and spend a few days with my family in Orlando, just a few hours away from where we actually lived, on a vacation that for once wasn’t spent in relatives’ living rooms. We’d hang out in the Goldilocks Zone, far enough away from home to avoid nagging responsibilities but close enough to sell to my overworked parents. Home was not far away when we needed to return, but why not take a few days off to lounge by the pool?

I never shared that half-baked dream with anyone, especially not with any Latin American authoritarians, but my strategy for stealing some time for poolside lounging seems to be the preferred second act for failed right-wing leaders from Central and South America. When defeated presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro fled Brazil for Miami earlier this week, he was taking part in a long tradition of conservative losers hopping a jet to the land of gun shows and foam parties. 

Thanks to its proximity to the Caribbean and South America, its significant immigrant population and Miami International Airport’s status as a hub for flights to and from points south, many a deposed leader has followed a route familiar to Super Bowl champions and snowbirds. When the rabble in the street gets too close to the presidential palace for comfort, they keep half an eye on Florida real estate, much like Northeast Corridor retirees. 

It isn’t surprising that the first notable leader to make the leap in modern memory came from Cuba, an island you can reach from Florida with a suitably kitted-out lawn chair. Facing the collapse of his government amid anti-democratic crackdowns and widespread labor unrest, Cuban President Gerardo Machado hightailed it to Florida in 1933. He would die in Miami just six years later. 

Cuban military dictator Fulgencio Batista spent the next several decades seemingly readying himself to follow Machado to the Sunshine State if and when he needed to make a quick exit. In fact, Batista purchased a home in Daytona Beach and lived there for several years following his initial ouster in the mid-1940s. He returned to power via a military coup in 1952, which in some ways lit the spark for Fidel Castro’s toppling of the Cuban government at the end of the decade. Forced out for the last time, Batista flew to Jacksonville and unsuccessfully requested asylum in the U.S. (He’d have done a lot better under our current president, no doubt.) He wound up fleeing to Spain, then in the grip of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, and spent the rest of his life in Iberian exile.

Anastasio Somoza was similarly denied safe harbor in the U.S. in 1979, after fleeing Nicaragua in a cargo plane headed for Miami. President Jimmy Carter declined to play host to the last member of a family dynasty that had ruled Nicaragua for 40 years. Somoza made it to Miami as his regime collapsed during the Sandinista revolution, then moved on to the Bahamas and ultimately to Paraguay, then under the rule of military dictator Alfredo Stroessner. It was no safe refuge: He was assassinated there by a Sandinista strike team just a year later.

The pitter-patter of Florsheim-shod feet heading for the Northern Caribbean hasn’t slowed in the 2000s. Deposed dictators, embezzlers and dissent-crushers have flooded into South Florida like the regular king tides. The Miami New Times published a morbid map of the stars in 2010, pointing out the addresses of various subtropical Mussolinis and disgraced generals and boasting that Miami makes “Casablanca look like a Daffy Duck cartoon.”

Former Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada ran to South Florida following revolts over his plans to export Bolivian natural gas to the U.S.. Notoriously corrupt Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli scarpered in similar fashion, though he was ultimately arrested by U.S. authorities in 2017 and sent back to serve a prison term.

With our own fash-flavored president making his official residence in Palm Beach, and his kids nearby in Jupiter, his Brazilian buddies were obvious candidates for taking their talents to South Beach. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro left for the southernmost red state after his defeat in the 2022 election, though he’s now back in Brazil serving a lengthy prison sentence on house arrest. His son Eduardo, also a former Brazilian elected official, landed Florida around the same time, but has now moved to Texas. Flávio Bolsonaro’s whereabouts since he deplaned at Opa Locka Executive Airport a few days ago are not entirely clear.  

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Florida has long had a significant right-wing Latin American population, thanks in large part to the many Cuban refugees who fled there in the wake of Castro’s 1959 revolution. And for the Bolsonaros, Florida is likely to feel more like home than anywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere. The state is home to more than a fifth of the Brazilian population in the U.S.

Though Flávio Bolsonaro initially boasted of being Brazil’s rightful president after landing in Florida, he seems to have ditched that line subsequently. Recent events have proven that we can never count out Brazil’s first family of fascism, but it isn’t likely they can use Florida as a base of operation for launching a reactionary coup. Outside of Batista’s complicated story, which didn’t end well for him, history has not been kind to those who hope to use an enforced vacation in the House of Mouse as a path back to the presidential palace. 

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Brazilian Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro fled his home country and arrived in the U.S. Tuesday, described by some on the right as a political refugee. After recently losing a presidential campaign against incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro’s passports were ordered seized by the government. Instead of turning them over, Bolsonaro took off with family members, traveling through Argentina, Ecuador and finally landing in Miami, Florida. The Trump administration was quick to issue a visa to Bolsonaro and members of his family, a senior State Department official told the Washington Post.

Bolsonaro ‌thanked Argentine President Javier Milei and President Donald Trump for helping him escape. He later posted on X, declaring himself “the elected president,” before that post was deleted and replaced with a letter saying he was the rightful “leader” of Brazil.

Bolsonaro, son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, is currently under investigation by Brazil’s Supreme Court for alleged money laundering, corruption and tax evasion in two cases, but has yet to be charged with a crime. If Bolsonaro is charged and convicted in the investigation, he could face extradition from the U.S.. His father is currently serving a 27 year prison sentence for trying to stage a coup in 2023, but for health reasons has been serving his sentence under house arrest. The elder Bolsonaro also traveled to Florida on the eve of Lula’s inauguration in December 2022 after losing the election.

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Lula won reelection by over 4 million votes on Oct. 25, defeating Bolsonaro in the second round of an election that promises to have profound implications for Latin American politics. It also gives Trump, an ally of the Bolsonaro family, less influence in South America. 

“I regret that he left Brazil, because he could have stayed here and proven that the accusations are not true,” Lula told supporters outside the presidential residence in Brasilia. “This act of leaving Brazil is shameful.”

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For a preview of the conservative copium that could follow the Nov. 3 midterm election results, look no further than the conspiracy theories MAGA’s biggest voices are already spinning about Brazil. The immediate reaction to the country’s presidential race makes clear that MAGA is preparing to unleash a predictable wave of election denialism. 

On Sunday, the incumbent leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva came back from a first-round deficit to beat Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro. It was the first time since Brazil returned to democracy in 1985 that the candidate who lost the first round won the runoff, and it made Lula the first person elected to his country’s presidency four times. Before the disappointment had settled, Lula’s MAGA detractors were turning an inconvenient result into an international election fraud narrative — and warning their followers that the same supposedly sinister forces were coming for the United States. Conservative podcaster and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon made the connection explicit: Without action, he claimed on his show, it would happen “next Tuesday.”

Other influential MAGA figures immediately began manufacturing reasons to doubt the outcome in Brazil, telling Americans that a right-wing defeat cannot possibly reflect what voters wanted. Nick Shirley primed his audience’s disappointment with an exuberant before picture. The 24-year-old YouTuber traded his trademark hoodie and the Minnesota daycare centers that gained him right-wing notoriety for a spot on Bolsonaro’s campaign bus and a pre-election parade, then reported back to his followers. “I have never seen crowds and energy like this for an election,” he posted Saturday, adding that thousands of people were chanting that Lula is a thief whose place is prison. On Sunday Shirley declared that Brazil’s right-wing revolution had begun. Then Lula won by roughly 4.4 million votes and the revolution lasted about as long as the polls stayed open. The hoodie had returned on Monday, along with Shirley’s posts about corruption and election meddling.

The centerpiece of the fraud story is a two-hour extension of voting on Sunday, ordered by Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin amid bad weather and transportation problems. Zanin once served as Lula’s personal lawyer, and the American right has treated that line on his résumé as a signed confession. MAGA conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec called the ruling unprecedented and said it came from a judge loyal to Lula. 

What MAGA leaves out is that both campaigns asked for more time. Lula’s side cited bus delays in cities where he was strong. Bolsonaro’s side cited flooding in regions largely loyal to him. In a race decided by millions, early data shows that fewer than 40,000 votes were cast during the added window. Still, Elon Musk told his 241 million followers that the math doesn’t add up. But it does. It just doesn’t add up to the answer he wanted.

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Bolsonaro himself initially called the extension a “dirty trick” and said he would challenge the outcome. Donald Trump supplied his blessing. At Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews, where he was about to board Air Force One to hold a rally for Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who is in a surprisingly tight re-election bid, the president told reporters, “It looked like another rigged election, frankly.” The White House Rapid Response account promptly promoted the clip, even as the president insisted he had not taken sides. He offered no evidence because there is none. 

Minutes after Trump signaled that he would not intervene, Bolsonaro effectively conceded and backed off his call to annul the election results. He said he would instead sue Lula for abusing the power of incumbency. “I wasn’t the one who lost; the system won,” Bolsonaro said, vowing to turn the overwhelming conservative legislature into a fortress against what he called barbarism.

The personal and political networks linking the MAGA movement to Bolsonaro’s ultra-conservative apparatus run deep, and they have been cultivated over years. Prominent figures within the American right, including Bannon and senior MAGA advisers like Jason Miller, have long maintained intimate ties with the Bolsonaro family. Organizations like the Conservative Political Action Conference have repeatedly expanded their presence into South America, hosting regional summits that fuse American-style culture war rhetoric with local right-wing nationalism. Mar-a-Lago has also served as a gathering ground for the Bolsanaros. When Jair Bolsonaro faced legal consequences and potential imprisonment in Brazil following his own post-election maneuvering, his political allies in the U.S. took the development as a personal warning, treating the legal accountability of a foreign leader as a direct threat to their own domestic political project.

Bannon’s “War Room” podcast has become a hub for election denialism. Right-wing pundits and administration officials alike have used the show to argue for a national emergency declaration covering the midterms. Bannon spent Monday demanding that Secretary of State Marco Rubio cut off diplomatic relations with Brazil and shut down trade entirely. The goal of his rant was clear: to convince MAGA that democratic institutions across the globe have been captured by hostile forces, rendering standard electoral participation obsolete unless it is backed by relentless resistance. Alex Jones declared that Brazil must be liberated. The disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn asked whether Brazil was turning into a banana republic. Kari Lake, who is hardly a neutral authority on losing gracefully after claiming fraud in her own losing bids for Arizona governor and the U.S. Senate in 2022 and 2024, said Brazil’s elections reminded her of Arizona’s. 

Running underneath the fraud talk is a conservative creation myth. MAGA lore holds that the Department of Government Efficiency’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development dismantled the left’s machinery in Latin America, and its triumphalists claim the left has not won a single election in the region since. But much of the region has been governed from the right for decades, and its longest-lived left-wing governments expelled USAID years ago precisely because they regarded it as a hostile American instrument, not a benefactor.

The immediate deluge of claims alleging manipulation and shadowy state intervention is more than standard right-wing culture wars. They are a calculated effort to prime American audiences for the idea that any electoral outcome unfavorable to Trump’s MAGA coalition is inherently fraudulent. The narratives depend on a selective performance of democracy in which visible enthusiasm for a preferred candidate counts as evidence of popular legitimacy, all while the actual votes can be dismissed as fraudulent whenever they produce an unwelcome result. Crowds become proof that a candidate must win. A defeat becomes proof that the system is rigged. No outcome can disprove the theory.  

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., recently told CNN that Americans have to assume Republicans will try to come up with any diabolical scheme to prevent Nov. 3 from being a free and fair election. After watching Brazil, you could argue the scheme is no longer diabolical so much as announced.

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In what’s being described as an unlikely comeback, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won reelection on Oct. 25, defeating Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro in the second round of an election that promises to hold profound implications for Latin American politics. That breaks a streak of seven straight victories for right-wing parties and candidates in Central and South America over the last year and a half, and denies President Donald Trump a key ally in Brazil.

From France to Russia, world leaders were quick to congratulate Lula, including some of those recently-elected right-wing presidents, such as Peruvian President Keiko Fujimori and Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella. But neither Trump nor Argentina’s right-wing president, Javier Milei, have joined in. Trump has claimed, without evidence, that the Brazilian result “looked like another rigged election, frankly,” telling reporters before flying to a Mississippi rally, “Elections have to be indisputable and it looked very bad to me.”

Bolsonaro, eldest son of imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro, initially said he intends to challenge the results, although there’s no precedent for overturning an election in Brazil. As of Monday, Lula had 51.79% of the vote while Flávio Bolsonaro had 48.21%, with nearly 97% of ballots counted. That marked a dramatic flip from the first round of voting on Oct. 4, when Bolsonaro led by nearly two full percentage points, 47% to 45%. This is the first time since Brazil returned to democratic elections in 1989 that a candidate who placed second in the first round went on to win the runoff. Most observers are saying that Lula’s campaign successfully doubled down on voter turnout, convincing many of the 33 million people who did not vote in the first round to show up for the runoff. 

Brazil’s back-and-forth presidential corruption

Lula is a longtime labor activist and co-founder of the left-wing Workers’ Party, who ran losing campaigns for president three times before being elected in 2002 and reelected in 2006. After leaving office he was swept up in a 2014 anti-corruption probe, convicted of corruption and money laundering and in 2018 was sentenced to 12 years in prison. A year later, The Intercept published reports that the judge and the lead prosecutor in Lula’s case had allegedly conspired in an effort to prevent him from running again in 2018. (In Brazil, presidents may only serve two consecutive terms, but are free to run again after that.) 

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After winning his release from prison in 2019, Lula completed his first remarkable comeback by narrowly defeating conservative incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in 2022 presidential election. Claiming election fraud, Bolsonaro incited a mob assault against government buildings in Brasilia on Jan. 8, 2023, almost exactly two years after the Trump-inspired riots at the U.S. Capitol. In late 2025, it was Bolsonaro’s turn to be convicted of crimes relating to the attempted coup. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison, but for health reasons has been serving his sentence under house arrest. Trump said at the time, “That’s very much like they tried to do with me. But they didn’t get away with it at all.”

A long fight ahead

Like his imprisoned father, Flávio Bolsonaro refused to accept Lula’s win, telling reporters “It is impossible to recognize the election results, given the circumstances under which things unfolded.” He’s citing a decision late on Sunday by a Lula-appointed Supreme Court justice to extend voting by two hours over alleged public transport irregularities, which does not seem likely to have affected the result. 

Nonetheless, Bolsonaro initially sought for the result to be annulled. Since he trails Lula by about 4 million votes in the official count, most observers said he was unlikely to succeed. Although losing sides have often complained about Brazil’s elections, the country’s electoral system is widely considered fair and transparent. Late Monday, after it appeared that Trump wasn’t going to help him, Bolsonaro effectively conceded. He is also now under investigation for an alleged money laundering scheme and authorities have seized his passport.

Lula’s win isn’t just encouraging for the Latin American left. It’s arguably also a victory for democracy and environmental causes, as the rate of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has fallen by 71% during his presidency. Greenpeace Brazil said the election “is a win for democracy and maintains the commitment to protecting the Amazon and fighting climate change.”

Still, Lula now faces a difficult political landscape, as conservative voters in the general election’s first round have packed Brazil’s Congress with allies of the Bolsonaro family, pushing the Brazilian legislature further right. “Bolsonarism remains a major political force among conservative voters,” Bruno Ronchi, a political science researcher at the University of Rennes, told France 24. “Flávio Bolsonaro’s result was not exactly a humiliating defeat.”

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