New Orleans, LA – About 20 students gathered outside Loyola New Orleans’ campus on Thursday afternoon, February 26, to protest a CIA recruiting event in the Loyola School of Business. Students stood defiantly chanting, “We want justice, you say how? CIA off campus now!”

“In 1989, CIA trained death squads in El Salvador murdered a group of Jesuit priests in cold blood. Loyola, as a school that is supposed to teach us Ignatian values, should never host these criminals!” said Mae Guidry, a Loyola student speaking for Students for a Democratic Society.

Finn Shields of LUNO SDS spoke on the history of the CIA and its operations in the United States, saying, “The CIA is not simply a perpetrator of senseless evils towards those beyond our borders. They are terrorists to the very people they claim to work in service of.”

Shields continued, “Let’s not forget the horrors of MK Ultra, when the CIA terrorized unwitting American citizens. The CIA also aided in the widespread poisoning of Americans through the crack-cocaine epidemic.”

Rory Macdonald, speaking for the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, addressed the crowd, saying, “It is so important for young people to be standing here today saying ‘I am tired of my government funding these criminals, sending them to other countries, deposing popular governments, and torturing and murdering civilians!’”

Macdonald concluded, “The brutality of the CIA shows us that, in the struggle between the workers and oppressed people of the world and the capitalists who run our country, there can only be one winner. We need to smash the CIA, we need to smash the capitalist government, and we need to build working class political power!”

The CIA event at Loyola was its third this week in a tour of Louisiana colleges. The first was at Tulane University on February 23, and the second was at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge on the 25th. All three CIA events were met with protests organized by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

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