Washington Waves Bolsonaro In, Then Claims It Did Nothing

Marco Rubio stood in Atlanta on Saturday, surrounded by diplomats from the Group of 20 largest world economies, and said the sentence the apparatus needed said: "We didn't facilitate anything." The same State Department had announced a day before Flavio Bolsonaro landed in Miami that he and his family would be granted US visas. Nothing facilitated. Just a visa, a landing, and a presidential decision.

Here's the sequence. Bolsonaro lost the October 25 run-off to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. He's under investigation in Brazil for alleged corruption, money laundering and tax evasion. Before he left, he'd been ordered to surrender his passport because police deemed him a flight risk. He reached Miami on Wednesday, after traveling via Argentina and Ecuador, a journey that some US media outlets reported was partly arranged with the help of Jason Miller, a White House official.

Who Has the Power

Rubio's account is a masterclass in passive construction. "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," he told reporters. The US government, he added, was not "involved directly in any of the moves that were made." Directly. That's the word doing the heavy lifting.

The decision came from one man. Reuters reported Bolsonaro was admitted under humanitarian parole, a status that typically lasts for one year. Humanitarian parole is a tool the US state uses to decide, case by case, whose suffering counts. Migrants fleeing violence wait years for that mercy, or never get it. A defeated candidate under investigation for corruption got a visa announcement and a Miami arrival within days.

Donald Trump, who had previously called Brazil's election "rigged," was blunt about it on Saturday at his Florida residence. "I think he got treated very shabbily, very shabbily, so he can stay here as long as he wants," the president told reporters. Indefinitely, in other words, if the president likes you.

What They're Calling "Persecution"

Bolsonaro refuses to concede and calls the results fraudulent, without providing evidence. Since landing in the US he's claimed to be the true "leader" of Brazil, and says he left because he was a victim of "persecution." Investigators, police and a passport order are persecution when you're the one holding the passport. Judge the vocabulary by who gets to use it and who gets believed.

Meanwhile, two governments are managing the fallout like a pair of landlords haggling over a broken window. Rubio said he saw Brazil's foreign minister, Mauro Vieira, in Atlanta on Friday and Saturday and expects to meet Brazilian officials again in November in France during a foreign ministers meeting. Trump's comments, the report notes, suggest relations between the Western Hemisphere's two largest democracies may remain strained for some time.

The Election Theater

The whole episode shows what elections are for. One side lost a run-off and rejected the count. The other superpower decided, from a podium and a resort, whether the loser gets a soft landing. Voters cast their ballots in Brazil; the consequences got negotiated between foreign ministers and a president who calls elections rigged when his allies lose them.

No one at the bottom got a say. The people who voted in Brazil, the people living under whichever government comes next, the investigators trying to do their jobs: they watched a man with a family visa and a flight route slip past a passport order. The powerful protect their own, and then they hold a press conference to explain that they didn't.