Old military video misrepresented as US operation in Venezuela
- Published on January 7, 2026 at 05:06
- 2 min read
- By AFP Middle East & North Africa
- Translation and adaptation Pasika KHERNAMNUOY , AFP Thailand
After US forces captured Nicolas Maduro on January 3, 2026, social media users circulated a video of an old military exercise and falsely claimed it showed the operation against the ousted Venezuelan leader in Caracas. The clip depicts a US Army exercise attended by President Donald Trump in North Carolina.
"US Army special unit DELTA FORCE launched an operation in Caracas," reads Thai-language text overlaid on a TikTok video of soldiers fast-roping from a helicopter onto a building, referring to the operators assigned to capture Maduro (archived link).
The post was shared January 4 by a local news account with more than two million followers as US forces snatched Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in an early-morning military strike.
The couple were flown to New York to stand trial on drug trafficking charges, with both pleading not guilty (archived link).
Trump has said the United States will temporarily "run" the oil-rich South American nation as it oversees a transition.
Similar posts also surfaced on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and X, racking up millions of views.
It also circulated in languages including English, Chinese, Hindi, Burmese, Indonesian, Portuguese and French.
However, the footage predates Maduro's ouster by several months.
A reverse image search using keyframes, combined with keyword searches on Google led to a clip showing the same scene posted to the verified X account of US presidential special assistant Margo Martin on June 11, 2025 (archived link).
"U.S. SPECIAL FORCES!" the post reads.
Similar footage was published on the US military's Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) website (archived link).
Its caption says it shows Special Operations Forces "conducting tactical maneuvers and aerial insertions alongside conventional airborne units" at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on June 11, 2025.
At the 1:31 mark of the video, scenes showing Trump wearing a white cap while observing the military exercise correspond to those shared in the false posts.
AFP has previously debunked a wave of misinformation related to US military activity in Venezuela and Maduro's ouster.
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