Brazil summons Argentina's diplomat over Flávio Bolsonaro's escape; Buenos Aires denies it
Brasília — A new chapter in the strained relations between Brazil and Argentina: Brazil's Foreign Ministry summoned the Argentine embassy's chargé d'affaires in Brasília, María Emilia Cortés, on Thursday to ask for explanations about the possible facilities the neighboring country gave Flávio Bolsonaro in his departure to the United States, diplomatic sources confirmed to El País.
The meeting took place at the Itamaraty Palace and was brief: Cortés met with the head of the Brazilian Foreign Ministry's South America Department, João Marcelo Galvão de Queiroz. “Explanations were requested. It is standard procedure; information was requested about an episode that is still very unclear to everyone,” the sources cited by El País said.
According to those same sources, the gesture was meant to express Brazil's “discomfort,” but there are no plans to escalate the conflict or to hold a future meeting between the Argentine representative and Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira. The idea in Brasília, they added, is to keep a low profile and turn the page as soon as possible, while President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has avoided referring publicly to the escape or to the possible help provided by Buenos Aires.
Argentina's version was the opposite. Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno denied on Friday that Brazil had requested explanations about the case. “FALSE. There was no request for explanations,” he wrote on the social network X, in a message that President Javier Milei shared, thus backing his government's position.
The background is the escape of the Brazilian former presidential candidate, the eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro. Flávio Bolsonaro crossed the border on Tuesday night and shortly after midnight boarded a private flight at the Argentine airport of Puerto Iguazú bound for Miami, with a stop in Guayaquil, flying over Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru to avoid Brazilian airspace.
Flávio Bolsonaro is under investigation in Brazil for alleged corruption, money laundering and currency evasion, and Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes had ordered him to surrender his passports and barred him from leaving the country. The newspaper La Nación reported that Milei adviser Santiago Caputo was in Puerto Iguazú during the transfer, although his possible participation in the operation has not been established in court. The Argentine government, for its part, maintains that the politician entered and left the country with valid documentation and without any impediment recorded by its immigration authorities.
Photo: EFE
Source: El País