In the predawn damp of Brasília, before the ministry buildings catch the light and the television cameras are switched on, the city belongs to the sweepers. Men and women in heavy orange vests move quietly across the esplanade, scraping gum from paving stones, gathering spent cigarette butts, and smoothing out the grounds of institutions that were so violently battered just a short while ago. Most of them ride buses two hours each way from the dusty satellite cities of Ceilândia or Samambaia. They do not have passports tucked into leather wallets, nor do they possess secondary residences where the tap water is fluoridated in American dollars. If the roof leaks, they patch it; if the rent goes up, they skip a meal. They stay because staying is the only choice the world has ever offered them.
How telling it is, then, to look toward the arrivals hall of Miami International Airport, where the luxury of departure is so routinely exercised. Flávio Bolsonaro, senator and loyal prince of the political dynasty that pushed Brazilian democracy to the brink of the abyss, has touched down in Florida. Confronted by questions about whether he was fleeing the mounting legal consequences of his family’s tenure, he did what modern reactionaries always do when the bill finally comes due: he cried persecution. He dusted off the discredited theater of stolen elections and unconstitutional coups, insisting that he was not in flight, merely abroad, merely misunderstood, merely a victim of an unjust state.
We have seen this film so many times across the Global South that the reels are worn thin. South Florida has long served as a sun-drenched sanatorium for Latin America’s disgraced oligarchs, failed coup-plotters, and strongmen in recess. It is an empire’s waiting room, complete with gated communities, familiar strip malls, and private banking channels designed to shield extractive wealth from the sovereign courts of the home country. When power slips from their grasp, the men who demanded total submission to authority discover an urgent fondness for international mobility. They posture as ideological exiles from the comfortable distance of air-conditioned steak houses, nursing grievances while the people they governed are left to clean up the shattered glass.
To understand the moral obscenity of this spectacle, one must look not at the man in the airport terminal, but at the four years of scorched-earth politics he leaves behind. Bolsonarismo was never merely a loud, vulgar rhetorical style; it was an economic and social project written onto the bodies of the vulnerable. It was the deliberate gutting of environmental enforcement, which invited wildcat miners and logging syndicates to poison the waters of the Yanomami. It was the reckless deregulation of firearms that flooded the favelas with lethal iron, and the cruel negligence during a pandemic that turned mass graves into a commonplace feature of Brazilian urban life.
Those who engineered this suffering now paint themselves as martyrs of a judicial witch hunt. It is a grotesque inversion of reality. The real dissidents in Brazil are not well-connected politicians traveling on diplomatic privileges, but the community leaders in Pará who sleep with shotguns beside their beds because land grabbers have placed bounties on their lives. The real victims of institutional violence are the favela mothers who still wait for an answer about who shot their teenage sons on the way to school. None of these people can board a flight to Miami when the political climate turns cold. They must live with the consequences of state power, day in and day out, with no escape hatch in sight.
What we are witnessing is the inherent cowardice of authoritarianism. When they occupied the presidential palace, the Bolsonaros and their allies loved to project an image of unyielding masculine force, sneering at human rights and promising that their opponents would rot in prison or vanish abroad. Yet the moment their grip on power failed—undone by the slow, stubborn courage of domestic workers, rural laborers, and ordinary voters who waited hours in the baking sun to cast their ballots—the swagger dissolved into whining. The alleged lions of the fatherland turned out to be tourists who pack their bags at the first sign of a subpoena.
A democracy cannot be healed merely by watching its tormentors pace the terminals of foreign airports. True accountability does not live in tweets, nor is it measured by the petty excuses offered to reporters in hotel lobbies far from home. It lives in the slow, painstaking restoration of the public commons, in the return of food security programs, the titling of ancestral lands, and the patient pursuit of equal justice under the law. The Bolsonaros may linger in Florida, trading fables of stolen glory with other wealthy expatriates who mistook a nation for their personal ranch. But Brazil remains where it has always been: in the hands of the millions who never left, and who are still sweeping up the mess.