Atlanta Braves outfielder Ender Inciarte is among a growing number of Georgians scrambling to ship desperately needed food and medical supplies to their native Venezuela, a South American nation descending into chaos amid rolling power outages, food riots and looting.
Still a Venezuelan national, Inciarte is shipping boxes of canned goods back to his family as the country struggles with plunging oil prices and a resulting economic crisis so powerful that people are being forced to sift through garbage in the streets for food.
Georgia has strong ties with Venezuela, so it is sharing in some of its pain. Inciarte is among more than 8,000 Venezuelan natives living in the Peach State, more than twice the number that were here in 2005, U.S. Census estimates show. Some of the Atlanta-area’s biggest and most well-known companies are doing business there, including Delta Air Lines and the Coca-Cola Co., both of which have suffered amid Venezuela’s economic struggles.
“It’s like they’re trying to run a dictatorship and 80 percent of the population doesn’t agree with that,” Inciarte said of his native country. “We get a lot of kidnappings, killing, no food. It’s a very sad situation there.”
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