A massive earthquake rattled Colombia on August 10, 2026, collapsing thousands of buildings and triggering a frantic search for survivors. But one widely shared video of a young man being pulled from a wreckage site has been misrepresented -- and was captured after double quakes struck Venezuela in June.
"MUST WATCH: A Life SAVED Out of the Rubble in Colombia After MAJOR Earthquake," says an August 12 post on X from Real America's Voice, a right-wing US media outlet.
Similar posts in both English and Spanish spread the same clip, in which a rescue team is seen lifting an emotional young man by his feet from beneath the rubble of a building.
The posts appeared after a deadly 7.4-magnitude earthquake -- the strongest to hit Colombia in a century -- shook the country's western coffee-growing region and Pacific belt, with the cities of Cali and Pereira among the most devastated.
Rescuers spent days scraping through the rubble of thousands of destroyed buildings, with some volunteers continuing to search for missing people a week after the quake, even as the chances of finding survivors drastically waned.
But the video spreading across social media platforms does not correspond to these efforts.
The earliest iteration AFP found -- uncovered via reverse image and keyword searches -- was published to Telegram June 27, 2026 by a Venezuelan photographer and videographer who uses the account handle "@nawseas" (archived here).
In other posts, the user said the sequence was filmed in the early hours of June 25, after back-to-back earthquakes of magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5 rocked the Venezuelan state of La Guaira on June 24 (archived here). The user placed the footage in the wreckage of the Club Residencial Caribe, a 14-story building that collapsed (archived here).
@Nawseas also posted photos of the same survivor to Telegram and shared similar footage of the emotional moments after the rescue on Instagram (archived here and here).
The user credited the rescue effort to a Venezuelan emergency rescue team known as the " Ángeles de la Autopista."
In the video, the group's name and emblem are visible on one rescuer's outfit.
The then-minister of transport also shared the footage in an Instagram post thanking the paramedics (archived here).
AFP has debunked other misinformation about the Colombia earthquake here.