General broadcasts doctored video about alleged opposition plan to eliminate Armed Forces, experts say

Over the weekend, a Venezuelan general shared on his judicial and military counterintelligence division of his country.

The images were manipulated, they were false, experts clarified, and the opposition asked the military for calm.

General in Chief Domingo Hernández Lárez, leader of the strategic operational command of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, one of the highest military officials in the country, accompanied his message on Saturday about Machado with a phrase from former president Hugo Chávez, whom he called “commander supreme and eternal of the Bolivarian revolution.”

“There will be no shortage of those who try to take advantage of difficult situations to maintain this commitment to the restoration of capitalism, of neoliberalism, to end the Homeland,” he wrote.

“No, they won’t be able to. Faced with this circumstance of new difficulties (…) the response of all the patriots, the revolutionaries, those of us who feel the country even in our viscera, as Augusto Mijares would say, is unity, fight, battle and victory,” added the official.

The Democratic Unitary Platform, the bloc of opposition parties, rejected in a statement the use of “misinformation as a tool for political campaigning.” “To the members of the National Armed Forces, serenity. In the new Venezuela, they will have a very important role of which their children will be proud,” he added.

Machado considered it “very serious” that members of the military High Command misinform. “They themselves know that it is false (…) The members of the military family know that in the new Venezuela they will have a future of dignity, security and respect,” he added on his social networks.

Specialists in detecting hoaxes (fake news) warned that the images released by the general were false. The NGO Hunters Fake News explained that Machado, who could not be a presidential candidate because she was disqualified, never gave a talk about the privatization of the State or the elimination of the FANB, specifying the origin of the images.

“The video was manipulated and is being used to expand the narrative against the opposition leader and her alleged policies of privatization of goods and services,” concluded the organization in an investigation published the same Saturday, June 22.

According to their investigations, it is probably a “video manipulation using a green screen effect” on the recording of a meeting between Machado and young people on June 15, where the opposition candidate Edmundo González also participated.

That effect can be created using editing platforms and applications. “This tool, also known as ‘chroma’, allows you to eliminate backgrounds to replace them with another video or image,” added the Venezuelan NGO in its publication.

The video is fake, according to experts

The origin of the video was a publication by Machado herself where it is observed that the blackboard in the background, where she had allegedly written the opposition plan, “was always blank,” according to Cazadores de Fake News. “The video is fake,” he insisted.

The material was shared by accounts on social networks and YouTube of supporters of the Venezuelan ruling party, including by a journalist from Telesur, on Instagram, who later deleted the publication, according to the NGO, which considered the fact as a “very serious” hoax or fake news. .

Machado won the opposition presidential primary last October, but was unable to register her candidacy due to having been disqualified from holding public office in Venezuela. The election will be on July 28, where President Nicolás Maduro aspires to re-election against the anti-Chavismo candidate Edmundo González, favorite in the polls.

Shortly before noon this Monday, the tweet with the hoax about the alleged plan by Machado and the opposition was still published on General Hernández Lárez’s account. Multiple social media users from divisions of the Armed Forces commented on the Venezuelan commander’s publication, considering the information to be true. Others warned him that it was false.

“FANB unity, fight, battle and victory. We will win,” wrote a National Guard Coastal Surveillance unit. “In the union of patriots there is the strength to overcome any adversity,” responded to the general’s message, on his behalf, the San Cristóbal Military Circle, a social club for members of the Armed Forces.

Communicators adept at Chavismo, such as Marialex Cerezo, who has 100,000 followers on

Carmen Beatriz Fernández, professor of political communication at the University of Navarra, Spain, specialist in cyberpolitics, disinformation and electoral campaigns, highlighted that the spread of hoaxes by the Venezuelan generalate is worsening because “media allied with the ruling party” replicated the information as true. .

Furthermore, he highlighted, the hoax fulfills its intention to misinform in private channels, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, whose recipients will probably never know the truth of that video and those altered images, known academically as “deep fakes.”

“For centuries, humanity believed in the axiom of ‘seeing is believing’ and today we have doubts whether what we are seeing can be true or not. We will continue to see things of this type,” commented Fernández in conversation with the Voice of America.

Systematic misinformation

The dissemination of false images by the Venezuelan general is not part of a mere mistake, but of actions designed to “systematically and strategically misinform the population” during the electoral campaign in Venezuela, warned the journalist and founder of the Venezuelan Observatory of Fake News, León Hernández.

“This unit of falsified content is very direct in its purpose: to damage the image of the opposition leader who capitalizes on her leadership on the sympathy of the population, in the face of the military sector,” commented Hernández, research professor at the Communication Research Institute. and Information from the Andrés Bello Catholic University.

The impact of the manipulated material is “more damaging” because it comes from a member of the country’s military leadership, he warned. “It creates more confusion and rumors on the part of his subordinates,” Hernández told the VOA.

“This action demonstrates the interest of contaminating the creation of public opinion with undemocratic purposes, in some representatives who are aligned with the government, without respect for the guarantees that they must offer to the population” before the elections, he points out.

Fernández, from the University of Navarra, said that the antidote to this type of falsified content is “digital literacy” for as many people as possible.

“To the extent that you teach people that these types of things can be done, you teach them to be more cautious before giving credibility to these tricks,” he said, applauding projects by NGOs and Venezuelan media that aim to dismantle these hoaxes, such as Cocuyo Effect, Fake News Hunters and the Venezuelan Fake News Observatory.

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