Video of Italy blackout falsely tied to Maduro arrest
- Published on January 7, 2026 at 17:08
- 2 min read
- By AFP Mexico, AFP Brazil
- Translation and adaptation Manon JACOB , AFP USA
Following the US military operation ousting Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, a video said to have accidentally captured the moment the raid in Caracas began circulated widely on social media. But the clip shows an apparent power outage in Italy in 2021 and has been repeatedly misrepresented across platforms ever since.
"A Venezuelan live streamer recorded the exact moment when U.S. bombs hit the energy facilities and the lights went out in south Caracas. This was the beginning of Trump's special operation to exctract [sic] Maduro," a January 3, 2026 post -- gathering tens of thousands of interactions -- claims on X.
The post shares a short clip of a person walking down the street speaking to their camera in Spanish as a siren sound loudly erupts before lights turn to black.
The clip circulated widely on X and across other platforms including Facebook, Reddit, and Threads, as well as in posts in other languages such as Spanish and Portuguese -- all connecting the footage the US raid in Venezuela.
A wave of misinformation flooded social media after Maduro was seized in an operation that saw American forces swoop into Caracas, under US President Donald Trump's orders, and extract the authoritarian left-wing leader and his wife, Cilia Flores, from the country.
The mission killed 55 Cuban and Venezuelan military personnel, according to tolls published by the Latin American countries. A doctors' group told AFP on January 4 that around 70 people were killed and 90 injured during the raid.
But the video shared on social media has nothing to do with the US military operation in Caracas.
Italy in 2021
Through a reverse image search, AFP identified the person in the video as influencer Gerónimo Benavides, from Argentina, who goes by Momo on YouTube (archived here and here).
Benavides did not respond to AFP's request for comment, but keyword searches using the influencer's name led to several identical clips posted to YouTube in November 2021 (archived here and here). The title of one of the videos placed the events in Naples, Italy.
AFP previously debunked the same video when it was falsely associated with Iran's 2024 attack on Israel.
Using Google Street View, the same storefronts -- including clothing shops and an ice cream parlor seen behind Benavides -- place the video on Corso Italia, a main street in the heart of Sorrento, on the outskirts of Naples (archived here and here).
A search on Momo's YouTube yielded a series of videos posted between November and December 2021 of a trip the influencer took to Italy (archived here).
In one, he is seen with a similar hairdo wearing the same jacket as in the video circulating in the context of Maduro's arrest (archived here).
AFP has debunked other misinformation about Venezuela here.
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