Footage from 2017 falsely linked to Venezuela election demonstrations
- Published on August 2, 2024 at 20:21
- 5 min read
- By AFP Colombia, AFP USA
- Translation and adaptation Daniel GALGANO
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"Venezuela Riots Protestors have completely taken over following election result. Insane footage," says one July 29, 2024, post on X with thousands of interactions.
The same video and claim circulated elsewhere on X, TikTok and YouTube-- including in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic and Russian.
The clip gained further attention when former Colombian vice president Marta Lucía Ramírez shared it on July 29.
Venezuela's electoral council, largely loyal to the president, declared on July 29 that Maduro won another six years in power with 51.2 percent of the vote.
The opposition says its own tally of polling station-level results showed its candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, a proxy for its popular leader María Corina Machado -- who was blocked from running -- is the rightful winner.
Maduro is under international pressure over the validity of the results, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying there is "overwhelming evidence" that Gonzalez Urrutia won the election.
Machado has called for protests "in every city" in the nation to denounce the disputed reelection.
However, the video being shared online was not taken in the days following the 2024 election but is from 2017.
A keyframe search using the clip revealed that the Argentina-based newspaper La Capital Mar del Plata posted the same video on YouTube on April 20, 2017 (archived here).
Several large anti-government protests broke out in Venezuela in April 2017 after the country's Supreme Court effectively dissolved the opposition-aligned legislature and revoked lawmakers' immunity from prosecution. Riot police and pro-Maduro vigilantes met the demonstrators and the protests eventually dispersed after several people died. AFP photographers captured images from those protests, seen below.
On April 19, 2017, crowds flooded the Francisco Fajardo highway near the Bello Monte neighborhood in the southeast of the capital, as reported by El Diario.
Google Maps street view imagery of the highway shows many of the same buildings and elements as those seen in the protest footage now spreading across social media platforms.
In the background of the protest footage, there is a building decorated with banners next to one topped by a billboard.
The building, which is located above a Central Madeirense supermarket, currently sports a different advertisement, but the same advertisement was captured in an April 2017 photo taken by AFP photographer Juan Barreto.
The video also shows a yellow building with large windows and a red sign with the inscription "Sabor Venezolano," which is a slogan for Nestlé Savoy chocolate.
An advanced internet search including the terms "Nestlé Savoy" and "Caracas" reveals a photo of the billboard overlooking the yellow building in the video on the collaborative map website Wikimapia (archived here). The coordinates on the site also correspond to the edge of the Francisco Fajardo highway in Caracas.
According to journalist and activist Melanio Escobar, the Nestlé Savoy logo was taken down in 2019 (archived link here) and Google Maps Street View imagery taken in July 2024 does not show the sign.
AFP Fact Check has debunked other false claims surrounding the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election.
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