Old video from Venezuela falsely shared as recent floods in Chile

On August 21, 2023, heavy rains in the central-southern region of Chile caused floods, leading President Gabriel Boric to declare a state of catastrophe in the country, Reuters reported. The floods affected the lives of tens of thousands of people. Many were cut off from essential services and electricity; evacuations were widespread.

What is the claim?

In the extreme weather, many social media users shared videos claiming to show the floods. One 10-second-long video shared across X and Facebook on August 22 shows a tree being swept away in a mudslide. The flood also washes a car away. The captions of these posts read, "Terrifying floods due to intense rains in santiago of Chile." One such post by an X user gained over 54,200 views and 113 likes. Archived posts can be found here, here, here, and here. 

The mudslide video has been circulated on X and Facebook recently. (Source: X / Facebook / Altered by Logically Facts)

 However, this video is not recent or from Chile.

 What we found

We analyzed a screenshot of the flood video and traced it to social media posts and news reports from October 2022.

On October 18, 2022, Noticias Barquisimeto, a Venezuelan digital news outlet, published a report that included the viral video. Noticias Barquisimeto's compilation of three video clips of the floods included an extended, 30-second-long version of the viral clip, in which a man can be heard speaking in Spanish. The news outlet also posted this to Instagram with a voiceover reporting on a river that overflowed in El Castaño, Maracay, Venezuela, and the death of at least three people in the flood.

News report of an overflowing river in Venezuela posted to Instagram on October 18, 2022. (Source: Instagram)

On the same date in 2022, other news outlets, such as Noti Cúcuta from Colombia and La Serena Online from Chile, also published extended versions of the viral video on their Facebook pages (30 seconds and 16 seconds, respectively) with Spanish captions. Noti Cúcuta's caption warned the people of Maracay that the Las Delicias River, which originates in the Henri Pittier National Park, had overflowed and that there was a mudslide. It also said many people reportedly climbed onto roofs to avoid the flood. La Serena Online's caption stated the overflowing river in El Castaño, Maracay, caused havoc and tragedy.

Facebook posts by Noti Cúcuta and La Serena Online on October 18, 2022. (Source: Facebook / Altered by Logically Facts)

 We noticed that the building visible in the 30-second video clip shown in the Noticias Barquisimeto report was a supermarket named "Walio Supermarcado." We geolocated it to a main road in El Castaño, a neighborhood in the town of Maracay, Aragua, Venezuela. Chile and Venezuela are in almost opposite parts of South America - southwest and north, respectively.

The geolocation of the supermarket seen in the longer version of the viral video. (Source: Instagram / Google Maps / Altered by Logically Facts)

Reliefweb, a U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) portal, published a press release on October 18, 2022, about the flooding events in Aragua, Venezuela. It added that according to the government of Aragua, three people had died, and 50 households had been affected in the Girardot Municipality (Maracay is a city in the municipality). It also recounted the fatalities from a previous landslide that occurred on October 9 in central-eastern Aragua, which increased the total to 50 people.

 The verdict

An old video of an incident in the El Castaño area of Maracay, Venezuela, has been incorrectly peddled as the recent flood in Chile in August 2022. Logically Facts could not verify the original source of the video independently, but the video has existed on the internet since at least October 18, 2022, predating the recent Chile floods. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.