On January 3, US forces captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in a military operation in Caracas and transferred him to New York to face federal charges, including narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. He appeared in a US court on January 5, pleading not guilty.

In the above context, a video is widely being shared on social media in which people are seen vandalising an effigy of a general with a sickle and hammer. The video is shared with a caption suggesting that it shows people in Venezuela celebrating the arrest of Maduro and the fall of the Communist regime in the country.

A social media user shared the video with a caption that reads, “It’s a good thing the US took him (Maduro), otherwise, the locals would have learned his anatomy the hard way.” (Translated from Hindi)

SouthCheck found that the claim is false. The viral video is old and from the Philippines.

On a Google reverse image search, we found that the same video was shared by a Facebook user on December 12, 2025, with a caption that, when translated to English, reads, “The people of the Philippines are protesting against a corrupt government. A dummy of the president, marked with three red stripes, can be seen holding a hammer. A reminder that the Philippines is a puppet of the Indo-Western world; the West knows every Vietnamese word for it: America’s puppet, capitalist, multi-party, pan-party Christianity, and so on.”

Hence, we can ascertain that the viral video is older than the arrest of Maduro.

Hence, we can ascertain that the viral video is older than the arrest of Maduro.

We further found that a similar video was shared by CNBC-TV 18 on December 1, 2025.

In the video, at around 24-minutes, we can see the same effigy in the viral video. The video is shared with a caption that reads, “Thousands of Filipinos marched in Manila on November 30 over alleged corruption in major flood-mitigation projects. Protesters have demanded accountability from President Marcos Jr’s administration as investigators have found funds diverted to defective or non-existent ‘ghost projects’”

We further found that the Hindustan Times had also reported on the incident on November 30, 2025.

According to the report, thousands of Filipinos took to the streets on November 30, 2025, to protest widespread government corruption tied to flood-control project funds. Demonstrators, including church leaders and civil groups, demanded prosecution of officials, the return of stolen money, resignations, and accountability for abuses of public funds.

Therefore, we conclude that the claim is false.