Brazil cancels Flávio Bolsonaro’s passports after missed deadline

Brazilian police have cancelled defeated presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro’s passports after he failed to surrender them under a Supreme Court order, the BBC reported. The move comes as the senator challenges his narrow loss to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, even though Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party has accepted the election result.

The BBC reported that the court gave Bolsonaro 24 hours on Monday to hand over his passports as part of a money-laundering investigation. Bolsonaro denies the allegation. NPR described the passport order as connected to a separate investigation and reported that Bolsonaro said police told him to surrender the documents after he visited his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, in Brasília.

“I was ordered right on the street to hand over my passports, and I’m also prohibited from leaving the country,” Bolsonaro said in a video posted Monday, according to NPR. He said the order was based on remarks by his brother Eduardo, who lives in the United States, suggesting he should leave Brazil if he lost.

Bolsonaro, 45, has said he has no plans to leave Brazil and intends to lead the opposition. But he missed the deadline to surrender the passports. Federal officers are checking border crossings to determine whether he may have travelled to Argentina, a police source told BBC News Brasil. Argentine authorities told the BBC they had no record of him entering the country through a border crossing.

Lula won Sunday’s runoff with 51.79% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 48.21%, the BBC reported, a lead of about 4.4 million votes. NPR put their totals at approximately 64.2 million and nearly 59.8 million valid votes, respectively. Lula had trailed Bolsonaro after the first round on Oct. 4, then overtook him to win a fourth term.

Bolsonaro has not conceded. He initially called for the election to be annulled, citing a two-hour extension of voting on Sunday that he called a “dirty trick.” NPR reported that Lula’s campaign requested the extension because of public transportation disruptions, while Bolsonaro’s campaign also sought more time because of heavy rain in southern Brazil. In Monday’s video, Bolsonaro said he would instead seek to have Lula’s victory disqualified over alleged abuses of political and economic power. “The law must apply to everyone,” he said. “The competition must be fair and equal, which did not happen.” NPR said he provided no evidence for that claim.

Liberal Party president Valdemar Costa Neto said Monday that the party recognizes the result, though it believes questions about the vote need clarification. President Donald Trump also questioned the election’s legitimacy without offering evidence, telling reporters Monday: “I didn’t take sides, but it looked like another rigged election,” NPR reported.

The BBC reported that Bolsonaro was already under investigation over alleged corruption involving financing for a film about his father, who is under house arrest after his conviction for plotting a coup. The BBC also reported that the Supreme Court ordered police on Tuesday to investigate alleged foreign funding of Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign.

Celebrating in São Paulo, Lula thanked young supporters who “took to the streets to defend democracy in the country.” According to NPR, he gained more than 10 million votes between rounds as turnout rose and voters who had backed other candidates or stayed home in the first round supported him.