Barber: Giants players reflect on trouble in Venezuela

SAN FRANCISCO

When you get to a baseball stadium early, you see the wheels of service of motion: concession-stand workers punching clocks, ushers receiving instructions, rolling trays of food weaving through the ballpark’s corridors. It’s uneventful bustle, and you quickly tune it out.

On a recent afternoon at AT&T Park, though, the scene crystallized for Gregor Blanco.

“A couple days ago, I was just walking through the hallway, and you see all the bread that’s there,” the veteran outfielder said last week, during the Giants’ most recent homestand. “In my country, there’s no way that’s there. If you see it, people just grab it because they’re so hungry. Little things like that, I’m like, man, we are so blessed here, being here in the greatest country in the world.”

There was a day when bags of sliced hot dog buns wouldn’t have meant much to Blanco. But his homeland, Venezuela, has fallen into a financial and political crisis so deep that it is beginning to absorb the thoughts of even its most high-profile emigrants.

It’s an especially salient point in Major League Baseball, which is heavily infused with Venezuelan players. According to Baseball Almanac, 112 Venezuelans played for the 30 major-league teams in 2017. Other than the United States, only the Dominican Republic (170) had better representation. Puerto Rico was a very distant third with ?30 players.

The Venezuelan roster includes some of the brightest stars in the game, like Jose Altuve, Felix Hernandez, Miguel Cabrera and Elvis Andrus. It’s safe to say that baseball is more integral to Venezuelan culture than it is here.

I had been hoping to talk to one of the Bay Area’s Venezuelan ballplayers for a while. Specifically, I wanted to talk to Blanco. The reason was simple. Of our four local candidates - the other three are San Francisco third baseman Pablo Sandoval and outfielder Gorkys Hernandez, and Oakland relief pitcher Yusmeiro Petit - Blanco is the most fluent in English. And my Spanish is weak.

I felt awkward when I approached Blanco at his locker. A major-league clubhouse is open for one hour before games. Some players sit and shoot the breeze with teammates. Others get busy watching film or stretching or running in the outfield. Some simply don’t like to be bothered. And here I was, about to ask Blanco to tackle a complex and distressing subject when he’d soon take his turn in the batting cage. I didn’t know how he’d react when I asked if he’d be willing to talk about what’s going on in Venezuela.

This is how he reacted: “I’m really glad you asked me about that. Because I want to make it more visible.”

So we chatted for a while. Blanco was patient and forthright throughout. And after that game, when most reporters had cleared out of the home clubhouse, I spoke to Hernandez, too. We faced more of a language barrier, but he also was receptive to my questions.

I’m going to say some things about Venezuela here. You may know all of it and more. I don’t mean to condescend. But the truth is that Americans have always been really good at not concerning ourselves with the rest of the planet. Even when intentions are good, the attention span rarely keep pace. It’s a measure of our privilege.

You probably know, then, that things are dire in Venezuela. But you may not have absorbed the depth of the problem.

“The little kids are dying,” Blanco said. “Five-, 6-year-old kids, 7-year-old kids, 9-year-old kids, they are looking in the trash cans, eating stuff out of the trash cans. And I’m not talking about really poor people, people living in the streets. But regular persons. They don’t have anything. … Those little kids are actually dying because they don’t have food, they don’t have medicines, they don’t have waters.”

As Hernandez said: “When I was young, we had everything.”

It should be noted that Hernandez, in relative terms, grew up with very little. The son of a single mother, he worked at a car wash as a teenager to help support the family. “We could find food, we could find medicine, everything,” he continued. “We could go to the hospital. Now you can’t find food, you can’t find the medicine. People die because if you go to the hospital, you have nothing to take care of you.”

None of this is hyperbole. Drastic shortages have stricken Venezuela over the past couple of years. Stores run short of staples like soap and toilet paper, and hospitals don’t have enough antibiotics or cancer drugs. Infant mortality rose by 30 percent in 2016. Malaria infections went up 76 percent.

According to a study by the Central University of Venezuela and two other colleges, up to ?90 percent of Venezuelans currently live in poverty. But here’s the number that really gets me: That same university study noted that Venezuelans reported losing an average of 24 pounds in 2017.

“People cry when they come here and walk to Safeway,” Blanco said. “They walk to Safeway and they see everything, and so many people cry. I saw it. From Miami, that’s where I live, and I saw people crying out there, because they can’t have found stuff like that in Venezuela anymore.”

Not surprisingly, the crime rate has soared. In 2016, Venezuela’s homicide rate was 91.8 per 100,000 residents, an all-time high there (source: the independent Venezuelan Violence Observatory). For comparison, the U.S. rate is 5 per 100,000.

These events have left the emigres stunned, because it wasn’t always like this in Venezuela. Far from it.

Venezuela, according to multiple sources (including OPEC), has the largest crude oil reserves in the world. It has been a major exporter for decades, which gave rise to a thriving middle class. The problem with relying almost exclusively on a single export, as Venezuela does, is that when the market drops, you are left vulnerable. That’s what happened when oil prices plummeted in 2014, and it has only gotten worse.

The national currency, the bolivar, is in freefall. The International Monetary Fund projects that the inflation rate in Venezuela will soar to 13,000 percent by the end of 2018. What does that number mean? If you bought a cup of coffee in Caracas for the equivalent of $1 in early January, that small treat is likely to cost $131 by late December.

It’s a disaster in every sense. And by all accounts (except perhaps his own), the situation has been made much worse by Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, who took power when Hugo Chavez died in 2013 and has built upon his predecessor’s authoritarian rule.

Maduro stripped the opposition-led parliament of its powers and has banned dissidents from the upcoming presidential election. His government has also outlawed protests, harassed journalists, refused to accept foreign humanitarian aid and, reportedly, siphoned off vast amounts of money from its own domestic aid programs.

“I’m not sure, because I’m not there,” Hernandez said. “But I think we have a dictator over there.”

Blanco doesn’t pull any punches, either.

“The government right now, they just want power,” he said. “They want all that money to them. And that’s the struggle we are facing as Venezuelans. They just don’t like to give to the people. The only hope we have, actually, is the U.S. take over there.”

In this economic vacuum, MLB’s Venezuelan ballplayers have become money pipelines. Hernandez said he sends a portion of his twice-a-month paycheck to his mother, who lives in the city of Maturin. Blanco said his father and brothers have travel visas and are able to visit him here; he sends them home to Caracas with food and clothes. He also frequently wires money through a third party.

“We’re all doing it,” Blanco said of his fellow players. “And literally you’re sending money so they can survive. That’s the word: ‘survive.’”

Life has become so cruel in Venezuela that its citizens are moving away in droves. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that about 1.5 million Venezuelans have left for neighboring countries like Brazil and Colombia.

Blanco acknowledged that his father and brothers are starting to talk about leaving. Some of Hernandez’s relatives have already done so. He has a brother and sister working in Argentina now, and his mother might join them.

Both of these Giants express a feeling of helplessness. They’re keeping relatives afloat with money. But what they really want is to bring them to America with immigrant visas. That includes Blanco’s oldest son, who is 12. Those documents are really hard to get, though.

“I tried to make a visa to my mother to come here,” Hernandez said. “But you’re not gonna get the visa. They gonna decline the visa. That stuff is hard for me, because like three years I haven’t seen my mom. Right now I can’t go to Venezuela because I’m doing my paperwork here, so I can’t leave the country.”

Short of securing visas, all the MLBers can do is keep that pipeline pumping, and raise awareness by wearing sleeves printed with the Venezuelan flag (as several players, including Hernandez, have done) or donning eye black that reads “S.O.S. Venezuela” (like Francisco Cervelli of the Pittsburgh Pirates).

“I want everybody to see I never forget my country,” Hernandez said. “I’m here. But every time, my country is in my heart and my mind.”

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: ?@Skinny_Post.