Venezuelan dissident Roderick Navarro remembers shedding tears of joy when the far-right firebrand Jair Bolsonaro was confirmed as Brazil’s next president.

“It was the first time in so long that I felt the real possibility of going back to my home,” says the rightwing activist exiled to Brazil since fleeing his country last year.

Bolsonaro, who takes power on 1 January, is famed for his loathing for Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, and the “despicable and murderous ideology” he believes Maduro represents. Last year Bolsonaro vowed to “do whatever is possible to see that government deposed” – a pledge that delighted anti-Maduro agitators such as Navarro.

Members of Brazil’s incoming administration have softened that discourse since Bolsonaro’s stunning October triumph. “It’s the Venezuelans who must solve the Venezuelans’ problems,” his vice-president, Hamilton Mourão, told the magazine Piauí recently.

Even so, there are those – including within Maduro’s own ranks - who believe Bolsonaro’s rise makes a US-led military intervention to dethrone Venezuela’s president more likely.

In October, a leading Brazilian newspaper quoted a senior Colombian source as saying Bolsonaro would have its backing if he moved to “bring down” Maduro by force, although both governments quickly denied the report.

This week, Maduro accused the White House of plotting his assassination and also claimed Bolsonaro’s inner circle was planning “a military adventure against the Venezuelan people”.

“Every day the vice-president says he’s going to invade Venezuela,” Maduro said of Mourão, Brazil’s former military attaché in Caracas, claiming he had “the face of a madman” and was a “crazy coward”.

Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based Crisis Group analyst, said that despite Bolsonaro’s hard-line rhetoric he was “obviously not going to invade unilaterally”.

But it was possible the future leader of Latin America’s biggest democracy might provide diplomatic cover to some kind of US action.

“He’s clearly very, very keen to bring Brazil absolutely into the sphere of influence of Trumpismo,” Gunson said. “So presumably if Trump said: ‘Look next week we are going to invade Venezuela – are you in?” Then Bolsonaro might well say: “Well, yeah, OK – let’s go for it.”

Donald Trump has warned there are “many options”, including a military one, to deal with Venezuela’s collapse, responsible for the most severe migration crisis in modern Latin American history.

Navarro – whose group, Rumbo Libertad, supports Maduro’s overthrow and says it is part of Venezuela’s anti-government ‘resistencia’ – denied he was banking on a Bolsonarian blitz.

“Lots of media are saying this military intervention might be done by the US or even by Bolsonaro himself. But this isn’t how it will be. It won’t be like the 20th century,” said Navarro, 31, who fled Venezuela in August 2017 after supporting a failed military uprising.

Since arriving in Brazil, Navarro has cultivated close ties with the Bolsonaro clan, meeting the future president for the first time in Brasília last year to discuss the Venezuelan crisis and rightwing politics. “It was like we were talking to ourselves,” the rightwing radical said of their political affinity.

Roderick Navarro, a Venezuelan dissident, in São Paulo where he has lived in exile since supporting a failed military uprising against Nicolás Maduro last year. Photograph: Tom Phillips/The Guardian

It is unclear how much support Rumbo Libertad enjoys in Venezuela. Henrique Capriles, one of the key leaders of its mainstream opposition, recently dismissed it as part of “a small extremist sect” that was intent on replacing Venezuela’s red dictatorship with one of another hue. Such groups were noisy on social media but did little to help feed starving Venezuelans, Capriles complained.

But Navarro does appear to have the ear of Brazil’s next president and his influential son, Eduardo, a 34-year-old politician who is positioning himself as Brazil’s answer to Jared Kushner – and recently travelled to the US to meet with Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Steve Bannon.

Last spring Eduardo Bolsonaro donned a black T-shirt stamped with Rumbo Libertad’s logo when he and Navarro flew to Brazil’s northern border to meet Venezuelan refugees during one of his father’s campaign events.

Navarro visited Bolsonaro at his Rio home the day after his election and says Brazil’s president-elect told him “he would definitely help to help secure our country’s freedom”.

In a video celebrating Bolsonaro’s election, Navarro told Venezuelan viewers: “This is also a victory for Venezuelans, for the resistance, for those of us who are fighting for our freedom. This is the beginning of the end of our Venezuelan nightmare.”

Harold Trinkunas, a Venezuela specialist at Stanford University, said that with a Bolsonaro presidency, dissidents such as Navarro “feel the regional politics are shifting in their direction”.

Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro. Photograph: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images

But Trinkunas doubted there would be a major impact on Brazil’s Venezuela policy, beyond increased diplomatic pressure and harsher sanctions.

“If they imagine that somehow the Brazilian armed forces under the direction of President Bolsonaro are going to change the government in Caracas, it reveals a complete lack of understanding of the military challenges that would present,” he said, pointing to the vast areas of jungle and savanna between Brazil’s northern border and Venezuela’s capital.

Trinkunas also doubted Trump would decide to become entangled in “a new, complicated state-building operation” given existing headaches in North Korea, Syria and Iran.

Navarro is a wanted man in Venezuela and was recently branded a traitor and terrorist by Diosdado Cabello, a top Socialist party figure widely touted as Maduro’s successor. He said he feared jail or torture if he tried to return now but believed Bolsonaro’s victory brought him one step closer to a safe homecoming.

“People within the resistance have more hope because Bolsonaro legitimizes the resistance and our plans to put an end to the narco-dictatorship. Now more than ever people believe that we can succeed.”

Eduardo Bolsonaro seems to agree. “The end is nearing,” he tweeted at Maduro this week. “And it is the Venezuelans who will bring it.”