After US special forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in an overnight raid January 3, 2026, social media networks flooded with images falsely linked to the operation or the reaction of the country’s citizens, in addition to a widely shared photo of the deposed president surrounded by soldiers that was created by artificial intelligence.
The misrepresented visuals ricocheted across platforms after Maduro was seized in an operation that saw American forces swoop into Caracas and extract the authoritarian left-wing leader and his wife from the country amid intense bombing.
Maduro and his wife pleaded not guilty in a New York courthouse January 5 on narco-terrorism charges, while US President Donald Trump has said the United States will temporarily “run” the oil-rich South American nation as it oversees a transition.
Amid international alarm, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told an emergency Security Council meeting that there should be “respect for the principles of sovereignty, political independence and territorial integrity.”
Below are several inaccurate claims AFP has fact-checked about the operation and global reaction to it.
AFP previously debunked the same falsehoods in Spanish.
AI-generated image
Following Maduro’s arrest, posts on X, Facebook and other platforms claimed to show the first image of Maduro in the custody of US forces.
The image, however, was generated by AI.
Reverse image searches in Google returned a result saying it was “made with Google AI.” Gemini, Google’s AI tool, also detected a SynthID — an invisible watermark the company says is meant to identify AI content created using its tools — attached to the picture.
Maduro appears younger in the fake image, with darker hair.
The earliest iteration of the image AFP found came from an X account holder who goes by Ian Weber, a self-described “AI video art enthusiast” based in Spain, who posted it just 20 minutes after Trump announced the operation on Truth Social. In a January 5 reply to that post, Weber admitted he created the image using AI (archived here).
In a January 6 interview via X direct message, Weber told AFP that he used Nano Banana Pro, an image generator within Gemini, and that he cropped out the watermark that typically populates in the corner of Gemini-created images. He shared with AFP the original result with the watermark still visible.
According to a screenshot of the Gemini chat also shared with AFP, he inputted a prompt that, translated from Spanish, read: “Nicolas Maduro detained by American assault forces. Put granular photo.”
“I never expected this to become the most shared picture worldwide,” he told AFP. “I never intended to claim that this was the first picture of Maduro being detained.”
Trump published an image on his Truth Social platform January 3 that he said showed Maduro aboard the US battleship USS Iwo Jima, in which Maduro appeared in a jumpsuit and blindfolded (archived here).
A bombing in Israel
One video of an overnight bombing was claimed to show the operation against Venezuela in posts on X and Facebook.
But reverse image searches surfaced the same footage in posts shared as early as October 1, 2024, which described the scene as an Iranian attack on Israel (archived here and here).
A Bellingcat researcher geolocated the video at the time to an area south of Israel’s Nevatim Airbase (archived here).
That day, Iran fired 200 missiles at Israel following the killing by Israel of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah the week prior.
Celebration in Chile
Another post on Facebook claimed to show “Venezuela roars of appreciation” in response to Maduro’s ouster.
The post shared a Spanish-language publication that captioned the footage as depicting “Caracas at this hour.”
AFP could not verify the exact origin of the footage but determined it was filmed in Santiago, Chile rather than Caracas. AFP geolocated the celebrations to the Avenida Alameda Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins in the city’s Estación Central area (archived here).
AFP captured similar footage of a crowd gathered January 3, 2025 in the Chilean capital, home to many Venezuelan migrants.
Similar celebrations cropped up in countries around the world, in addition to some protests against the US military intervention, including one gathering of some 2,000 Maduro supporters in Caracas.
Statue toppled in 2024
Social media users including conservative commentator David Harris Jr, whom AFP has repeatedly fact-checked for spreading misinformation, also claimed a clip of Venezuelans toppling a statue of ex-president Hugo Chávez was captured after the US operation.
Chávez governed from 1999 to 2013. Maduro served as a lawmaker, foreign minister and vice president before being chosen by Chávez as his successor three months before the socialist firebrand died of cancer.
The video was in fact captured July 29, 2024, however.
Reverse image searches surfaced earlier publications from the same and similar angles that traced the footage to protests in the Venezuelan city of Calabozo (archived here, here and here).
Demonstrators knocked down multiple statues at the time, in a rejection of Maduro’s claim of victory in the country’s hotly disputed July 28, 2024 elections.
January 7, 2026 This article was updated to include quotes from X user Ian Weber.
January 6, 2026 This article was updated to clarify language around Trump's Truth Social post featuring an image of Maduro.
