Denver students rally against Venezuela attacks, demand Lockheed Martin off campus

Denver, CO – On January 3, the Trump administration launched airstrikes on Venezuela and kidnapped President Maduro from his home country. On January 22, just days after the semester started, a group of students from Denver Students for a Democratic Society held a protest outside Metropolitan State University’s Jordan Student Success Building.

Metropolitan State University maintains a relationship with Lockheed Martin, one of the leading weapons manufacturers in the world, that includes a building on the Auraria campus. Within those walls, there are students who are being groomed to build the very weapons that were used in the attack on Venezuela. Denver SDS condemned Metropolitan State University for its relationship with Lockheed Martin.

“The U.S. military used Lockheed’s bombs on Caracas in civilian neighborhoods in the middle of the night and killed 80 people while abducting Maduro and his wife. And guess who funneled engineering students into creating weapons of war used to terrorize other countries? Guess who is the main funder of the Auraria engineering program? Lockheed Martin!” said Bailey Heaton of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

Lockheed Martin provides funds to over 900 colleges and universities all over the United States. They are also one of the top employers of engineering students, as a high paying career in weapons manufacturing is attractive to freshly graduated students with high student loans. While students face excessively high education costs and struggle to make ends meet financially, MSU lines its pockets with money from one of the most destructive weapons manufacturing agencies in the world.

“The U.S. was facilitated by genocide of the indigenous population of this land and was built by the backs of those who were enslaved. This system existed to keep the wealth and power in the hands of the white elite, who sat in their thrones across the seas in their plantation mansions, while they built our country on the backs of people coerced to be here. And now we see them trying to continue this legacy of harm through the prison industrial complex that is enslaving Black and brown bodies once more to the war profiteering that leaves other countries decimated and our veterans broken and the complete lack of government accountability,” said Elizabeth Wolf, from the Psychedelic and Natural Medicine Alliance.

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