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When his supporters broke into Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices earlier this week, Jair Bolsonaro was nowhere to be seen - in fact, he was in Florida, living in a house rented by a martial artist and going to KFC. Bolsonaro had at least publicly urged his supporters not to engage in violence and seemed to have no clear way to return to power via the actions of his supporters. Whereas the January 6th insurrection was part of a well-orchestrated plan by the sitting president to convince his vice-president to steal an election, the hapless Bolsonaro supporters’ plan seemed to go something like: 1) Riot 2) ????? 3) Bolsonaro returns to power.
There’s no doubt that Bolsonaro’s reckless and criminal rhetoric inspired the riots, although whether he knew in advance exactly what was going to happen is unclear. If he did, he surely would have needed to be in the country to have any chance of parlaying it into a return to power. The Brazilian authorities have arrested some senior law enforcement figures on suspicion of involvement, so it’s possible the idea was that the military was going to sweep in and take power and then Bolsonaro would triumphantly return. That doesn’t seem very likely to me, both because the military made no indication they were prepared to do that, and because it seems unlikely the Biden administration would have allowed Bolsonaro to fly back from Florida in order to participate in a coup.
Either way, now that this has all happened, it looks likely that Bolsonaro’s stay in Florida might become permanent. He originally said his plan was to be in the U.S. for one to three months, but if he entered on his A-1 visa - a special class only available to sitting government officials, which he still was when he entered the U.S. - then he could stay indefinitely.
And maybe he will. There’s a rich history of foreign presidents and prime ministers fleeing to the U.S. when staying in their own country becomes untenable. Many of these former leaders have been American allies who got on the wrong side of a democratic, Islamist or Communist revolution at home, and for them the calculation was usually pretty straightforward - America was safe, and it’s a pretty sweet place to live if you arrive with plenty of ill-gotten gains. For the U.S. government, though, it wasn’t so simple. A ruthless dictator was useful when he was in a foreign capital oppressing America’s enemies - less so when he turned up powerless in New York needing protection.
This has led to some legendary disappointments among dictators who thought Uncle Sam owed them a break. When Ferdinand Marcos was deposed as president of the Philippines in 1986, he fled with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cash to Guam, and then Hawaii. He promptly set about making plans to invade the Philippines from exile and overthrow its new government, prompting Ronald Reagan to place him under “island arrest”. Reagan also refused to protect Marcos from legal difficulties, and while in the U.S. he was prosecuted by none other than Rudy Giuliani on federal racketeering charges for looting the Filipino treasury. Marcos died before the trial and even the saner, soberer Giuliani of the late 1980s failed to make the charges stick against his wife Imelda.
Another famous dictator who found a less warm welcome than he might have hoped was the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. After he fled the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Shah first outstayed his welcome in Morocco and then got fed up of the Bahamas because - according to Jimmy Carter’s memoirs - “the prices were too high”. A lot of the shah’s friends in America wanted Carter to invite him in, but the president was worried that Iranian radical groups might retaliate against Americans still in Iran - and sure enough, after the shah was finally briefly admitted for medical treatment, the Iranian embassy siege began, ultimately dooming Carter’s presidency. The message for future presidents was clear: they had a lot to lose, and not much to gain, by harboring an unpopular has-been.
What’s interesting about both of these cases - and relevant when considering Bolsonaro - is the way they intersected with domestic politics in America. The shah would probably have been welcomed much more enthusiastically by many other American presidents, but Carter - who wanted to make human rights a cornerstone of his foreign policy - insisted that he leave after receiving medical treatment. Apart from the shah’s own shameful record of oppression, Carter rightly saw that hosting him was a barrier to establishing good relations with the new Iranian government.
Bolsonaro’s situation is likewise complex. Brazil is a staunch American ally, but he made himself an enemy of a Brazilian democracy in a way which caused revulsion among most interested Americans. On the other hand, Bolsonaro was popular with Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, who saw the Brazilian leader as the “Trump of the tropics”. He hence can’t expect any sympathy from the Biden administration if the Brazilian government does ultimately try to have him extradited to face charges associated with the riots, and he might eventually decide to go elsewhere - I hear the Bahamas are lovely, if a little expensive. Of course, his situation would have been very different if Donald Trump was still in power. Hell, Trump might even have tried to pardon him of crimes committed under Brazilian law - it would make as much sense as many other of Trump’s pardons.
Bolsonaro doesn’t appear to have arrived in Florida carrying suitcases stuffed with dollars and jewels, so if he does end up passing into exile in America, it’s likely to be a mundane one. That’s not unusual either - most exiled leaders haven’t tried to invade their home countries or caused international incidents, and instead have faded into obscurity. Nguyen Cao Ky, a leader of non-Communist South Vietnam who was eventually booted from office by the Communists, lived a quiet exile in Southern California which included operating a liquor store that he eventually ran into the ground (probably why I’ve never been able to find it). Iran’s top general under the shah, Gholam Reza Azhari, had such a quiet exile in Virginia that I’ve been unable to locate any information about what he got up to. Maybe, just maybe, Bolsonaro will pass into a similar silence.
Or maybe not. It’s possible to imagine a future in which Donald Trump returns to power in 2024, even more unhinged than before, and brings Bolsonaro back into his orbit. The two might share old war stories about stolen elections and liberal elites, and even plot the latter’s return to Brazil. Maybe Bolsonaro will follow that predictably tiresome path of every controversial right-wing figure and end up a talking head on Fox News. Or maybe he’ll settle down on The Keys, while away the rest of his life eating KFC, and finally reckon with what he’s done.
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