Does a video capture Venezuelan immigrants surging through a supermarket in Aurora, Colorado? No, that's not true: The earliest version of the video on TikTok was geotagged to a city in Brazil, not in Colorado or the United States at all. Nothing in the footage proved that it was filmed in Aurora. Instead, all indicators, including the crowd's use of Brazilian Portuguese, suggest it was shot in Brazil.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok on September 1, 2024, under the caption:
Venezuelans over run a store in Colorado 🫣
The line describing the footage contained several hashtags:
#venezuela 🇻🇪 #venezuelangangs #aurora #hellsangles #cnnnews #trump #fyp
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Sep 10 19:18:46 2024 UTC)
The earliest example of the same footage (archived here) that Lead Stories found was posted on TikTok on June 16, 2024. It did not include a caption mentioning Venezuelans or Colorado:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Sep 10 21:29:50 2024 UTC)
That video was posted with a geotag linking the scene to a particular place in Brazil: Salvador, the capital city of the state of Bahia, roughly 5,580 miles away from Aurora, Colorado.
(Source: Google Maps screenshot taken on Tue Sep 10 23:58:55 2024 UTC)
The video footage contained neither English-language food-description labels, nor dollar-denominated price tags. The latter would be a given for supermarkets in the United States. A standard U.S. grocery store would have item labels in English; even groceries that sell mostly imports usually have at least some English-language labels.
Other clues also indicated that the scene was not filmed in Aurora.
In Brazil, Portuguese is the official and most frequently spoken language (archived here), unlike in Venezuela, a predominantly Spanish-speaking country, where, according to the CIA World Factbook, only 0.1 percent of the population (archived here) uses Portuguese for communication.
And Portuguese is the language seen and heard in the video.
One example is the aisle 13 sign, seen below. Lead Stories' translation of the sign from Portuguese appears on the right. (The screenshot's contrast and sharpness have been increased to make the sign's words more visible.)
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Sep 10 21:43:51 2024 UTC; Google Lens screenshot taken on Tue Sep 10 00:51:49 2024; composite image by Lead Stories)
Portuguese-speaking Lead Stories staff confirmed that audible fragments of the conversations were in the version of Portuguese spoken in Brazil.
In part, the following sentences could be distinguished from the loud supermarket ambiance:
'Da de quanto?''Tu queria o que moça?'
As translated by DeepL, an AI-enabled translation tool, and verified by Portuguese-speaking Lead Stories staff, the sentences mean: "How much?" and "What did you want, girl?"
None of that implies that "#venezuelangangs," as the hashtag in the post on TikTok suggested, had "over run" the supermarket. By contrast, one woman was seen smiling and another three female customers appeared to be engaged in a relaxed, casual chat next to the section with frozen items.
In the video, several people were seen carrying packs of Donna Benta's penne pasta, a Brazilian brand (archived here). Later, the camera captured a person in a T-shirt with the name of a Brazilian soccer player (archived here) on it.
(Sources: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Sep 10 21:45:06 2024 UTC; TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Sep 10 21:44:00 2024 UTC; composite image by Lead Stories)
Another person in the video wore a beige uniform with the Serval logo on it. The same logo appears on the website of Brazilian-based Grupo Serval (archived here), which offers security and cleaning services.
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Sep 11 15:45:38 2024 UTC)
The post on TikTok that is the focus of this fact check was not the first time that rumors about "Venezuelan gangs" in Aurora appeared online. Lead Stories previously debunked a series of those claims here.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims about immigrants in the United States can be found here. Our fact checks of claims about Venezuela can be read here.
