Memories of the darlings and demons that have dotted US policy in the Western Hemisphere never disappear easily, thanks in this instance to Flávio Bolsonaro, Brazil’s defeated far-right presidential candidate, who arrived in Florida on Wednesday after being trounced by incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by more than four million votes in Sunday’s run-off.
Lula, who turned 81 this week, mused that his opponent must have a lot to hide to flee from justice in the manner he did. Flávio is under criminal investigation for money laundering, and the Supreme Court had ordered the police on Monday to seize his passport. On the other hand, and this is precisely the point, even such an overwhelming mandate did not deter Flávio’s patron in Washington, US President Donald Trump, from claiming that the vote in Latin America’s largest country was rigged.
Trump even praised the right-wing Liberal Party leader, never mind that, during his election campaign, Flávio advocated eight-year prison sentences for mobile phone thieves and chemical castration for rapists and paedophiles, following the model of El Salvador’s current strongman President Nayib Bukele.
US Intervention In Venezuela
More ominously, under President Trump’s close watch, what began in September 2025 as a series of US attacks on boats allegedly linked to Venezuelan drug cartels in international waters, killing several people, culminated in the dramatic capture on January 3, 2026, and incarceration in a Brooklyn jail of the leftist dictator and former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. This operation by the American military in Caracas to bring down the autocrat, whose 13-year rule left millions without adequate food and essential medicines, marked a dramatic escalation in US intervention in Venezuela.
Another Venezuelan leader who sought a safe haven in the US, albeit in the distant past, was General Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the country’s brutal dictator for nearly a decade. Famously, and perhaps also controversially, in 1954, he was awarded the Legion of Merit by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Jiménez was overthrown by the so-called Patriotic Junta in a bloody revolt that claimed more than 100 lives and left hundreds more wounded. After fleeing Caracas, General Jiménez and his family spent several years in Miami Beach before he was extradited to Venezuela in 1963. In 1968, Venezuela’s Supreme Court found him guilty of embezzling more than $13 million and sentenced him to more than four years in prison.
A Pattern Of Backing Strongmen
Anastasio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua took brief refuge in Florida after his ouster by the Sandinista revolution in 1979. Haiti’s Lieutenant General Prosper Avril similarly went into exile in Florida in 1990 following a concerted bid to remove him from power.
These and several other incidents are a telling record of American foreign policy in practice, not just in Latin America, but elsewhere: propping up strongmen when they serve Washington’s interests and dislodging them when they no longer do.
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