An American man was wrongly arrested for child abuse after performing the Heimlich manoeuvre on his adopted son in Bogotá, triggering a furious mob that had been deceived by a viral video.
The 36-year-old Texan, who had adopted three children in Colombia, was filmed on Saturday holding a boy on a balcony in a northern district of the city. The woman who recorded the clip screamed: “He’s abusing the child, let him go!” Several other onlookers joined the chorus, yelling for police to be called. The man looked out at the crowd before ushering the child inside.
Within minutes, an angry mob surrounded the apartment complex and attempted to break in. Protests formed outside the lobby, trapping the father inside until officers arrived. Police arrested him on suspicion of child abuse and escorted him through the baying crowd, which had been whipped up by existing concerns about child sex tourism in the country.
Authorities who entered the apartment found three children, according to Mayor Carlos Galan, who posted on X that the youngsters were taken to a medical centre for evaluation. Colombia’s state agency for child protection later confirmed that all three children are now in its care.
But the arrest unravelled within hours. President Gustavo Petro intervened, stating: “I must notify Colombian society because my commitment is to the truth, that the American citizen of Texan origin, captured in an apartment in northern Bogotá, apparently did not violate any of his adopted children in Colombia. He took him out to the balcony due to a clog from eating the food poorly. The images deceived the Colombians who went en masse to defend the child.”
The Colombian Attorney General’s office issued an official report that determined “there had been no sexual abuse and no physical violence” and “no evidence indicating criminal conduct”.
https://twitter.com/dianadiago/status/2066270413622051114
The father had been trying to stop his adopted son from choking to death on food. The Heimlich manoeuvre — abdominal thrusts designed to dislodge an obstruction from the airway — was misread by the onlookers as an assault. President Petro acknowledged that “now we have indeed made victims of boys and girls” and said that if the indications of the facts are confirmed, “justice must grant him all his rights as a human being”.
President Warns of AI Manipulation and Collective Deception
President Petro devoted the most extensive part of his public comments to the role of artificial intelligence and misinformation in the affair, warning that Colombia is vulnerable to manipulation from foreign powers, especially during elections.
Hoy, sobre el mediodía, la Policía y los equipos de @Bogota respondieron a la alerta de la comunidad de un presunto caso de abuso sexual contra un menor de edad en Usaquén.
La Policía de Infancia y Adolescencia hizo presencia en el lugar de los hechos para atender el caso, igual…
— Carlos F. Galán (@CarlosFGalan) June 14, 2026
Invoking Simón Bolívar, he said: “A good lesson in reality for those of us who can easily be collectively deceived by images that do not match reality, and that is precisely what the entire Colombian society lives through, bombarded by companies with artificial intelligence.”
He argued that the incident demonstrated how reality can be transformed into virtuality through digital manipulation. “Here they transformed, as it seems to be the same case of the supposedly paedophile American, reality into virtuality. Massive, collective deception through manipulation of consciousness. Colombians are exposed, like the whole world, to computer manipulation, and it is being fully used in these elections in Colombia.”
Petro claimed that foreign actors are deliberately using AI to sow confusion and provoke public outrage. “They want to dumb us down through artificial intelligence on information channels,” he said. Drawing a direct line from the mob’s error to the broader threat, he concluded: “I believe we have transformed into a paedophile, someone who is not.”
