I’ve had this fantasy since I was a kid, starting with an impressive run on Wheel of Fortune. I would smoke other contestants’ cigarettes while the amazing Pat Sajak looked on, crucially solve the prize puzzle, and win nearly every game show’s grand prize: a vacation package built around a “trip to sunny Florida.”
I would catch a free flight home and spend a few days with my family in Orlando, just a few hours away from where we actually live, a vacation that wasn’t spent in a relative’s living room. We would hang out in Goldilocks, far enough away from home to avoid annoying responsibilities but close enough to sell stuff to my overworked parents. When we need to get home, home is never far, but why not take a few days off and lounge by the pool?
I never shared this half-baked dream with anyone, least of all with any Latin American dictator, but my strategy seems to be the preferred second act for failed right-wing leaders in Central and South America. When failed presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro fled Brazil for Miami earlier this week, he was following a long tradition of conservative losers jetting off to the land of gun shows and foam parties.
Many of the deposed leaders have chosen routes familiar to Super Bowl champions and snowbirds due to their proximity to the Caribbean and South America, their large immigrant populations and Miami International Airport’s status as a hub for flights to and from the South. When the rabble on the street gets too close for comfort to the presidential palace, they remain semi-concerned about Florida real estate, like retirees in the Northeast Corridor.
It’s no surprise that the first famous leader to make the leap in modern memory came from Cuba, an island just a proper lawn chair ride from Florida. In 1933, Cuban President Gerardo Machado fled to Florida as he faced the collapse of his government due to anti-democratic repression and widespread labor unrest. He died in Miami just six years later.
Many deposed Caribbean or South American leaders have followed a familiar path to Super Bowl champions and Snowbirds. When the rabble on the street gets too close to the presidential palace, they half-concern Florida real estate, like retirees in the Northeast Corridor.
Cuban military dictator Fulgencio Batista spent the next few decades seemingly poised to follow Machado to the Sunshine State if he needed to leave quickly. In fact, after Batista first stepped down from power in the mid-1940s, he purchased a home in Daytona Beach and lived there for several years. He returned to power in a military coup in 1952, which in part provided the spark that led to Fidel Castro’s overthrow of the Cuban government at the end of the 20th century. Batista was forced out of the country one last time, flying to Jacksonville and applying for asylum in the United States without success (no doubt he would have done better under our current president.) He eventually fled to Spain, then under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, and lived the rest of his life in Iberian exile.
In 1979, Anastasio Somoza was similarly denied entry to U.S. safe harbor after escaping Nicaragua on a cargo plane bound for Miami. President Jimmy Carter has refused to host the last member of the family dynasty that has ruled Nicaragua for 40 years. Somoza came to Miami after the fall of the regime during the Sandinista Revolution, then traveled to the Bahamas and finally to Paraguay, then under the rule of military dictator Alfredo Stroessner. It was not a safe haven: just a year later, he was assassinated there by Sandinista commandos.
The march of Florsham shoes into the Northern Caribbean hasn’t slowed down in the 2000s. Deposed dictators, grafters and suppressors of dissent are pouring into South Florida like a regular king’s tide. In 2010, the Miami New Times published a morbid star map pointing out the addresses of Mussolini and disgraced generals across the subtropics, and boasted that Miami made “Casablanca look like a Daffy Duck cartoon.”
Former Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada fled to South Florida amid protests over plans to export Bolivian natural gas to the United States. The notorious Panamanian president Ricardo Martinelli fled in a similar fashion, although he was eventually captured by U.S. authorities in 2017 and returned to prison to serve his sentence.
Our stylish president has his official residence in Palm Beach, his children live in nearby Jupiter, and his Brazilian buddy is an obvious candidate to bring his talents to South Beach. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro traveled to the southernmost red state after losing the 2022 election, but he is now back in Brazil serving a lengthy sentence under house arrest. His son Eduardo, also a former Brazilian elected official, arrived in Florida around the same time but has now moved to Texas. When Flavio Bolsonaro got off the plane at Opa Locka Executive Airport days ago, his whereabouts were not entirely clear.
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Florida has long had a large right-wing Latino population, thanks in large part to the many Cuban refugees who fled there after Castro’s revolution in 1959. For the Bolsonaros, Florida may feel more like home than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere. The state is home to more than one-fifth of the Brazilian population in the United States
Although Flavio Bolsonaro initially boasted that he was Brazil’s legitimate president after arriving in Florida, he later appeared to back away from that claim. Recent events prove that we can never rule out Brazil’s fascist First Family, but they also cannot use Florida as a base of operations for a reactionary coup. Aside from Batista’s complicated story, which did not end well for him, history has not been kind to those hoping to use an enforced leave of absence from the House of Mouse as a way back to the presidential palace.
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From Alex Galbraith