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Mass. Venezuelans send aid back home to quake survivors, with an assist from Amazon 37%
By Simón Rios54%
7/17/2026, 8:17:04 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 16 faulty reasoning types, including In-Group Bias, Halo Effect, and Appeal to Authority, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 13.5% saturation with 83 hits. Analysis detected 571 faulty-reasoning hits from 617 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 43.6% and a BS Rank of 37% (13,821 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 63.10% of the article peer group.
Juan Salcedo helped load pallets onto a semi truck Friday — 40 in total carrying 42,000 pounds of food and personal supplies, destined for his hometown: La Guaira, Venezuela.
Salcedo lost eight loved ones in the quake last month, including two cousins and their entire families.
The Beverly resident said he’s kept his mind off the devastation by mobilizing relief from Massachusetts.
“Translating the pain into action,” Salcedo said, standing inside a half-loaded 18-wheeler.
“That's how I've been the past two weeks, just translating the pain to action and helping.”
Since the earthquakes struck, Venezuelans across Massachusetts have joined to collect supplies for the disaster relief, organized by Casa de Venezuela New England and the Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts.
Chelsea-based La Colaborativa assisted with logistics, providing the pallets, the pallet jack and the forklift, as well as the manpower to load the trucks.
Salcedo said it’s hard to communicate to non-Venezuelan friends the magnitude of the destruction in La Guaira, a port city where the country’s main airport is located.
Thousands have been declared dead, and tens of thousands more are reportedly missing.
“ Imagine if one day you get an earthquake and 80% of the neighborhood is gone,” he said.
“How many friends, family members, people that you know are gonna be gone?
That's what's going on in La Guaira right now.”
The outpouring of support resulted in donations at Venezuelan shops and restaurants around the Boston area.
Volunteers packed the goods into boxes, then stacked the boxes onto pallets, before storing them at a warehouse in Somerville.
Salcedo said the next big challenge was how to get the donations to Miami, where another organization would handle the final leg to Venezuela.
Quotes from transportation companies came in around $30,000, Salcedo said, and volunteers couldn’t justify spending that much to move pallets around the U.S.
That's when Amazon stepped in.
On Wednesday, Valentina Amaro Bowser, a local Venezuelan activist who works as a spokesperson for Gov.
Maura Healey, called a Venezuelan friend who works for Amazon in Boston.
“She connected me to the disaster relief team that they have, and we went through a vetting process, just making sure that everything that we were sending was going to be useful for people back home,” Amaro said.
Two days later, two Amazon trucks arrived at the warehouse in Somerville, sent courtesy of the world's largest company (by sales).
Amaro said once the two semis get to Miami, the nonprofit Food For The Poor will step in to ensure the goods get to Venezuela.
“It’s an effort of the whole community together,” Amaro said, “putting together our contacts, our skills and just making sure that we send stuff back home.”
The Somerville semis are part of a broader Amazon relief effort supported by Amazon in La Guaira, where the company estimates more than 650,000 people are in need of aid.
Amazon says it’s using its global "logistics network and aviation capabilities" to deliver critical supplies, with seven weekly relief flights to Venezuela, in coordination with the U.S.
State Department, the humanitarian group Airlink and the United Nations World Food Programme.
The corporate support is welcomed by many in a country reeling from decades of one-party rule and economic devastation.
That includes widespread criticism of the government's response to the earthquakes in La Guaira, where rescue workers and traumatized community members have largely been left to their own devices to dig through the rubble.
Carlos Morales, another local Venezuelan who works for the Chelsea-based La Colaborativa, said the support from Amazon shows that Venezuela is not alone.
“It's another lesson that capitalism works," he said.
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