Shane Su­perville

Videos cir­cu­lat­ing on so­cial me­dia show­ing tac­ti­cal mil­i­tary ve­hi­cles be­ing trans­port­ed by trucks in Trinidad have been de­bunked as “old footage” from a train­ing ex­er­cise ear­li­er this year and not part of the USS Grave­ly’s vis­it last week.

The clips, shared on Tik­Tok, showed what ap­peared to be Heavy Ex­pand­ed Mo­bil­i­ty Tac­ti­cal Trucks (HEMTT A4) be­ing dri­ven and towed on trail­er beds in an undis­closed part of Trinidad, be­lieved to be Ch­aguara­mas. An­oth­er video post­ed by the same ac­count showed the ve­hi­cles be­ing es­cort­ed by lo­cal po­lice on mo­tor­cy­cles.

The videos sparked spec­u­la­tion on­line, with some users sug­gest­ing the move­ment was linked to re­gion­al ten­sions, in­clud­ing com­ments such as “All that go­ing deep south to deal with Maduro” and “Some­thing go­ing down and they know.”

How­ev­er, a reg­i­ment source con­firmed that the footage was not re­cent and had been record­ed by a civil­ian dur­ing the Tradewinds Ex­er­cise held be­tween April 26 and May 8. An­oth­er source said the ve­hi­cles shown were strict­ly for “non-com­bat use” and used to as­sist in lo­gis­tics and train­ing.

So­cial me­dia users lat­er added con­text to the orig­i­nal post, clar­i­fy­ing that the video de­pict­ed move­ments from the joint mil­i­tary ex­er­cise in­volv­ing lo­cal, re­gion­al, and for­eign de­fence forces. The ex­er­cise in­clud­ed train­ing in marks­man­ship, wa­ter­man­ship, first aid, and close-quar­ters com­bat.

Guardian Me­dia sent ques­tions to the Min­istry of De­fence on Wednes­day seek­ing con­fir­ma­tion on whether the ac­tiv­i­ties shown in the videos were re­cent, but no re­sponse was re­ceived up to press time.