3 published verifications about Venezuela Venezuela ×
“Political ties between Turkey and Venezuela strengthened after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro supported Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during the July 2016 attempted coup in Turkey, and Turkey–Venezuela trade turnover reached nearly US$1 billion by 2023.”
The claim gets the diplomatic story broadly right but overstates the 2023 trade number. Maduro did support Erdoğan during the 2016 coup attempt, and ties between Turkey and Venezuela did strengthen afterward. But the best 2023 trade data place bilateral turnover around $663–700 million, not “nearly $1 billion”; that level fits earlier peak years better than 2023.
“Venezuelan nationals died in the sinking of the RMS Titanic in April 1912.”
No credible evidence supports the claim that Venezuelan nationals died in the Titanic sinking. Over a dozen independent sources drawn from official passenger manifests, British Board of Trade records, and the 1912 inquiry find zero Venezuelan nationals aboard. The sole source naming Venezuelan victims is a low-authority blog that provides no primary documentation, and one of its named individuals appears to be a misidentification of a known American survivor, Thomas Drake Martínez Cardeza.
“An iguana caused a power outage affecting the state of Anzoátegui, Venezuela.”
The claim is rooted in a real April 2010 incident in which Venezuela's state electricity company, Corpoelec, blamed an iguana for a power outage in Anzoátegui — but it overstates both the certainty and the scope. No independent source verified the iguana as the actual cause; the attribution is widely characterized as political scapegoating for systemic grid failures. The documented outage affected "10 sectors," not the entire state, making the unqualified phrasing materially misleading.