Egura Americas Inc.: Abort?

 

Egura Americas Inc.: Abort?

Hello, good morning.

I am a libertarian soul. Every day I learn to defend, second by second, natural liberty. I understand the foundation laid by the Founding Fathers: the restless pursuit of happiness, the defense of private property and life, natural rights, and natural law.

My brother Paul studied in Grand Rapids and at GMU. He is drifting toward the “ordoliberal” side. I hope he never crosses into the dark side—the illiberal one.

I’ll get straight to the point.

I admire the American people. I know President Trump will not attempt a third term. First, American democracy and the Republic would not allow it. Second, his own sense of historical legacy would not let him stain the balance of eight years of successes and failures.

I publicly appeal to the institutions that sustain a free society: the free press, American democracy, the justice system, the American family, and money itself—the human institution that flourishes in open, free markets and remains a beacon of liberty for the future of humanity.

I ask all of you to pressure against a serious error by the American nation, its society, its leaders, and its voters regarding Venezuela and current and future deals involving its oil.

I am not against the “Seven Sisters.” I prefer the well-known oil majors that the world already understands. What I denounce is the opacity of the present and future agreements over a commodity as abundant in Venezuela as energy.

I reject and refuse any participation by corrupt, immoral, and unethical actors—self-styled Venezuelan oil czars and a handful of new, mid-sized, briefcase companies that almost certainly serve as vehicles to launder money for the same people who have ruined a nation of liberators for 27 years. A country that for two centuries welcomed immigrants from around the world is now exporting eight million souls under narco-Gramscian socialism—the ideology that has captured education, culture, and the media.

My maternal grandfather, Miguel Méndez Isaba, never attended university, yet he worked with stoic honesty until the age of 95. In the 1930s he was an office boy for the Bermúdez Oil Company, a cousin of the oil majors. He worked alongside the “gringos” because he had learned English during eight years of childhood exile with his mother and siblings in Brooklyn in the 1920s and 1930s.

My paternal grandfather, Jaime de Elguezabal Olabarrieta, a Basque, studied at the University of Liège. He arrived in Venezuela in 1937 on a ship of Basque nationalist refugees that stopped in New York. He could have stayed there; I might have been a New Yorker. Instead he settled in the vibrant, forward-looking Caracas of the 1940s. He taught soil and civil engineering at the university and traveled frequently to the United States as a member of the American Asphalt Association.

As you can see, I have real ties to my American brothers and sisters. I admire dozens of Americans—Friedman, Sowell, Rice, Napolitano, the Rands (Ron, Paul, and Ayn), Montaner, Chafuen… There wouldn’t be enough space in a thick Sunday edition to list half the people I listen to and learn from daily while walking barefoot in Navarre for my health.

In recent days I have posted on social media about this grave matter: the risk of killing the hope for a new democracy, liberty, ethics, and morality in Venezuela through this grotesque “agreement” with crooks, swindlers, corrupt operators, pseudo-businessmen—mercantilists of the kind Adam Smith already denounced in the Anglo-Saxon islands, at the very time the Founding Fathers were drinking from the same well of Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment. A virtuous world, once.

I am putting at risk not only my water-and-energy project, which I intended to support the oil industry across the Americas—from Texas to Vaca Muerta, and of course any major refinery in a free Venezuela just 100 kilometers from my home. I know that challenging such powerful actors, each with billions of dollars in opaque accounts around the planet, is almost corporate suicide. It also endangers my life and my family’s. One does not lightly “mess with the wrong gorilla.”

I prefer to lose—to abort Egura Americas Inc.—rather than remain silent in the face of such an open, corrupt operation.

I alert the FBI, CIA, NSA, and related agencies that, as I once signed in an online declaration for a prize funded by American taxpayers, I solemnly promised to have no connection with drugs, terrorism, or corruption. I take that commitment seriously. Even though that process ended years ago, I continue to honor it fully out of my own ethics and the values of my family.

I hope this serves as a clear, publishable summary for the readers of an open and virtuous society.

Mikel de Elguezabal Méndez
73492846A
Navarre