Flávio Bolsonaro, a Brazilian senator, who had been defeated by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the vote of 25 October, arrived in Miami this morning with his wife and two daughters, as UPI and Euronews report. The day before, Tuesday, late at night, he had crossed into Argentina by the bridge called Tancredo Neves; Argentina's migration directorate itself confirms it publicly, adding that they entered with valid documents and no legal impediment. From Puerto Iguazú they flew in a private aircraft operated by Baires Fly S.A. to Guayaquil in Ecuador, where the engines were refuelled, and then on to Florida.

Yet Alexandre de Moraes, a justice of the Supreme Court, had on Monday forbidden him to leave Brazil and ordered him to surrender his passports; he ignored the deadline, and the Federal Police cancelled every one of them. The inquiry concerns money laundering, illegal foreign-currency dealings and, as Euronews adds, tax evasion. He himself insists he has done nothing wrong and that the investigation is driven by party hatred. But next January his senatorial office expires, and with it the immunity that shields a defendant from the court. The timing of the flight tells the cause plainly enough. Donald Trump, for his part, as an American official said, saw to it that visas would be issued; he called the family 'fine people' and said the election was strange and terrible. In Argentina, moreover, the papers Clarín and La Nación report that Santiago Caputo, an adviser to Javier Milei, was present as the aircraft departed. What he did there, no one has yet said; a Roman magistrate would ask that first.

Nor will I conceal what the other side complains of. Hungarian Conservative reports that Cristiano Zanin, a justice appointed by Lula and once his advocate, extended voting on the final day by two hours, when some polling places had already closed; and that Bolsonaro had led the first round. If Brazil's courts have gone over to the factions, as Rome's did after Carthage was destroyed, the evil is grave, and it belongs to no single party. But the same paper admits that Lula won by about 4.4 million votes, and that Bolsonaro's own faction, the Liberal Party, has acknowledged the result. An unjust judge is beaten in court, not at an airport.

I know this manner well. Catiline, as he left Rome, wrote to the men of consular rank that he had been beset by false charges, that he was yielding to the faction of his enemies, that he was going into exile at Massilia so that the commonwealth might have peace. I do not charge Bolsonaro with conspiracy, which no report describes; I recognise the complaint itself, always the same: cry persecution, escape the judge. Nor have I forgotten that I too, returning from Africa, was accused, and was kept safe by favour rather than innocence; all the more surely do I know how much a powerful patron can do against the laws.

Long ago, in truth, we lost the true names of things: giving away other men's goods is called generosity, daring in wickedness is called courage. Now flight is named exile, the harbouring of a defendant hospitality, foreign patronage friendship. Once Jugurtha bought Roman senators to be safe at home; now the beaten man seeks protection from a foreign king, and he who has a patron across the sea does not fear the judge at home. The remedy is old: let the defendant stand at home; let judges prefer to be fair rather than to seem so; let allies not receive other nations' fugitives as friends. He who flees his country's judge finds abroad not a host, but a master.