In 2022, when right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro lost his re-election bid to former leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, few if any pro-Lula Brazilians openly celebrated in Florida.
Many feared backlash if not bullying from the overwhelming pro-Bolsonaro majority of Brazilians here — os Bolsonaristas.
"I wore a red shirt on election day to the [Miami] polling site to show my support for Lula," recalled Brazilian expat Ingra Magalhães, a media content creator who lives in Broward County.
"But the harassment and insults I got from Bolsonaro supporters became so bad I had to run back to my car before I voted and put a raincoat on."
But four years later, as Brazilians came out for last month's presidential election on Oct. 25 — a contest this time between President Lula and Bolsonaro's son, right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro — things were muito diferente.
At the expat voting site on Miami-Dade College's Kendall campus, Magalhães spied Bolsonaro's other son, former Brazilian Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro. He lives in Miami now after he fled Brazil last year to escape his trial and eventual conviction on obstruction of justice charges.
"I saw many pro-Bolsonaro Brazilians gathering around him like he was some kind of superstar," Magalhães told WLRN.
"So I stepped forward and called him foragido."
Foragido — Portuguese for "fugitive."
READ MORE: Florida's Bolsonaristas say they're 'doing God's work.' But is their cause all that holy?
But Magalhães wasn't alone. Other pro-Lula expats confronted Eduardo Bolsonaro, too, calling him "fugitive." And, Magalhães said, they didn't have to run away.
Since 2022, she pointed out, “pro-Lula people here have been getting together — WhatsApp group meetings and support like that — and now I feel less alone here in the United States.
"The Bolsonaristas cannot intimidate us anymore.”
That resolve among more moderate and liberal Brazilians in Florida has appeared just as evident in the wake of last month’s presidential vote.
After losing to Lula — and refusing to accept the results — Flávio Bolsonaro himself fled Brazil, where he is under investigation for corruption. He denies the allegations, but he too came to Florida at the invitation of President Trump and insisted that he, not Lula, is Brazil's legitimate "leader."
And pro-Lula Brazilians here have not been shy about protesting.
In social media posts, groups with names like Lula's Army In The U.S.A. are openly calling for the Trump administration to reverse course and deport Flávio Bolsonaro back to Brazil.
They want him to face the federal investigation there — but they say there's a larger, more urgent reason for rallying to keep a spotlight on his stay and activities here:
When Flávio’s father, Jair Bolsonaro, came to Florida after losing in 2022, he spent his time here plotting a coup to overturn the election. That resulted in a violently destructive but failed insurrection by his supporters in Brazil’s capital, Brasília.
After returning to Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro was convicted for that putsch plot last year and is now serving a 27-year sentence under house arrest there.
Brazilian expat Sara Sias, the Lula's Army In The U.S.A. spokesperson, says preventing another coup plot from Florida soil is a priority.
“Here in the United States we have a voice that we don’t have in Brazil," Sias said.
"And we can amplify this mission now because we have the Democrats’ support and Trump is weak. So we have the perfect storm to cut off the head of the snake of any new plot — so they’ll never try this kind of thing again.”
"We have been getting together in WhatsApp groups, and now I feel less alone here in the U.S. The Bolsonaristas cannot intimidate us anymore.”South Florida Brazilian expat Ingra Magalhães
Because she says she's received death threats for her Lula's Army posts, Sias asked WLRN not to disclose where she lives. But as she points out, the seismic defeat Democrats handed Trump and Republicans in the Nov. 3 U.S. midterm elections has also emboldened anti-Bolsonaro Brazilians here.
“In the United States there’s an empowerment for the Brazilian progressives also, because we don’t want Florida to be that stereotype of a refuge for outlaws like the Bolsonaros," said Pietra Diwan, executive director of the Brazilian studies nonprofit Terra Brasilis Institute in Miami.
"And as a result I think we’re going to see a trend of the Bolsonaristas here to stop being so loud.”
Expat ecosystem
Maybe not quite yet.
Florida is home to a fifth of the million Brazilians living in the U.S. — and more than three-fourths of them voted for Flávio Bolsonaro in last month's election. Like many Cuban exiles, pro-Bolsonaro Brazilians see Lula and anything to the left in Latin America as dangerously communist.
Brazil’s Supreme Court has been widely criticized for leftist bias; Flávio and Eduardo Bolsonaro claim they were fleeing political persecution by Brazil's judiciary. But capitalist, democratic Brazil, under Lula or any president since the 1985 end of the country's 21-year-long military dictatorship — a brutal regime the Bolsonaros frequently praise — is hardly communist Cuba.
Still, conservative Brazilians in Florida are themselves taking to social media now and threatening to report Lula supporters to ICE, or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to have them deported. (That prompted panic at Miami-Dade College on Oct. 4, the day of the Brazilian election's first round, when a man dressed as an ICE agent roamed the crowd of expat voters. He was later arrested.)
As one popular pro-Bolsonaro influencer here, Viviani Ellsworth, warned Lula supporters on Instagram: "Voces vão comer merda" — "You're all going to eat sh*t"
“There’s definitely an expat ecosystem for Brazilians in Florida as there is for Cubans and Venezuelans," said Guilherme Casarões, a Brazilian-born political science professor at Florida International University in Miami.
"And in the past, to showcase the minority Brazilian political preference here — it could come with a huge cost in the community, including in some cases whether or not you got hired, or fired, for a job."
Casarões, though, says he too sees that Florida Brazilian dynamic changing.
“This is the first time the left feels it can finally mobilize," he said. "So I think that explains why people feel more comfortable to be outspoken.”
Until Trump is out of office, the chances of Flávio Bolsonaro being sent back to Brazil are slim. But in the meantime, more moderate and liberal Brazilians no longer feel like they’re the political fugitives in Florida.
