US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the Trump administration did not facilitate defeated presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro's departure to the US after he left Brazil following his election defeat to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
"We didn't facilitate anything," Rubio told reporters in Atlanta on Saturday, 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 US 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 arrived in Miami on Wednesday, a day after the State Department said that Bolsonaro and his family will be granted US visas after his weekend loss in a hotly contested race that bucked a trend of conservative electoral results in Latin America.
'Victim'
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 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 February 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."
