When news broke that police had arrested Ovidio Guzman, the son of the well-known Mexican drug lord “El Chapo”, on January 5, armed members of his cartel took to the streets, engaging in violent clashes with police. A wave of videos claiming to show these clashes was uploaded to social media. It turns out, however, that a number of them are fake.
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When news broke that police had arrested Ovidio Guzman on January 5, a flood of videos started circulating on social media. Some of the videos supposedly showed Guzman’s arrest, while others were said to show clashes between members of his cartel and security forces.
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However, amongst the scores of videos that appeared online, there were a number of fake or misleading videos – or footage taken out of context. For example, some of the videos that circulated online in recent days actually showed Ovidio Guzman’s first arrest, back in October 2019.
- Another video, said to show clashes in Culiacan, Mexico, was actually filmed on the set of a Brazilian TV series. Another video, said to show Mexican tanks in Culiacan, was actually filmed in Turkey.
The fact-check, in detail
On Thursday, January 5, the news broke on social media that Ovidio Guzman, the son of the well-known Mexican drug baron Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzman, had been arrested. News of Guzman’s arrest sparked clashes between armed members of the Sinaloa cartel, founded by Guzman’s father, and the police in Culiacan, where Ovidio Guzman lives.
Dozens of videos appeared online, said to show this important arrest. But a number of these videos were actually filmed several years ago.
The video of Ovidio Guzman’s arrest is actually from… 2019
A video showing Ovidio Guzman stepping out of his home to turn himself over to the police has been circulating widely, especially on TikTok, along with the hashtag “#últimahora”, which means "last minute" in Spanish. These accounts are implying that the videos show the arrest that took place on January 5, 2023.
The video was quickly picked up by other accounts on Twitter and shared in other languages. One account shared the video on January 6, along with the caption, in French, “images of the chaos in Mexico since this arrest”.
It turns out, however, that while this video does indeed show Ovidio Guzman being arrested, it is not from January 5, 2023 but from October 2019, as demonstrated by Mexican fact-checking outlet El Sabueso. El Chapo’s son was indeed arrested by the security forces back in October, but was soon released.
You can see the original images in this video by the Spanish media outlet El Pais.
Videos of shootouts taken out of context
In the wake of Guzman’s arrest, there were a number of violent clashes between Mexican security forces and armed men from the Sinaloa cartel, the criminal organisation run by El Chapo. These clashes, most of which took place in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa, also generated their share of fake videos.
For example, this Twitter user shared images of clashes on the afternoon of January 5, alleging that the “bullets continue to rain” in Culiacan.
While there were indeed violent clashes on January 5, resulting in the deaths of 29 people, these videos actually show clashes in Culiacan back in October 2019 after Guzman’s first arrest. They were so bad that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ordered Guzman to be released.
Reuters identified videos showing the same scene filmed from different angles in a Mexican TV report shared on television from 2019.
Another video showing two groups shooting at one another also circulated widely, with social media users claiming that the video documented the situation in Culiacan after Ovidio Guzman’s arrest.
However, this video doesn’t have anything to do with Sinaloa or even Mexico. It actually comes from the set of the Brazilian series “Arcanjo Renegado”, which was filmed back in 2019 in Rio de Janeiro. You can see the same footage in this Youtube video posted in 2019.
Reuters reported that this scene did indeed appear in the first episode of the series.
In some cases, the media added to the confusion, linking some of these videos with what happened on January 5. This video made by the French daily Le Figaro includes the footage from the set of “Arcanjo Renegado”.
Did the Mexican government deploy tanks against the cartels?
Videos said to show Mexican troops being deployed in Culiacan also circulated online. Some of these videos featured tanks. This video, for example, garnered more than 1.5 million views. The account that posted this video on January 5 claims that it shows “tanks belonging to the Secretary of National Defense arriving in Culiacán [...] after the arrest of Ovidio Guzmán”.
However, these videos were also filmed way before the arrest took place. Mexican media outlet El Sabueso discovered that the same videos had been posted online as early as July 2016 and had nothing to do with Ovidio Guzman’s arrest.
These videos also don’t have any connections with Mexico. The first account that posted them online said they were filmed in Istanbul, Turkey.
This video was first posted online on the night of July 15, 2016, when there was an attempted military coup against the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Even if it is hard to authenticate these images, it’s likely that they show tanks in the streets of Istanbul after the coup.
Even though there were military vehicles in Culiacan on January 5, none of the videos recorded by official media outlets showed tanks on the scene.
