Sentenced to Life in Child-Porn Witchhunt

Free Daniel Guevara Vilca Now!

The following is not a fictional account inspired by the works of Franz Kafka. It is an outrage all too real. On November 3, 26-year-old Daniel Guevara Vilca was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. His supposed crime? Possession of child pornography. Vilca came under investigation in December 2009 when the Collier County, Florida, sheriff’s department identified his computer IP address among those accessing child pornography on an online networking site. A Peruvian-born stockroom worker who required a translator to follow the court proceedings, Vilca has maintained throughout that he was not aware of the pornographic images that police investigators claimed to have found on a computer in his home.

Having turned down a plea bargain of some 20 years in prison, Vilca now faces a sentence comparable to someone convicted of first-degree murder. Vilca’s defense lawyer Lee Hollander, who announced plans to appeal, denounced the sentence as cruel and unusual punishment, explaining, “People who are actually creating child porn or molesting children are getting lighter sentences than people who are in possession of it.” After legally entering the U.S. in 2000, Vilca overstayed his visa, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the hated I.C.E.) has already placed an immigration hold to prevent any possibility of his release. Even if Vilca wins his appeal, la migra is waiting in the wings to deport him. All that’s missing from the state vendetta against this man is burning at the stake.

Child pornography, like any pornography, is images and words intended for entertainment—nothing more, nothing less. Sexually explicit art has existed since man began to draw. The criminalization of pornography, like that of drugs, gambling and consensual sexual activity, is aimed at regimenting the population and increasing the state’s repressive powers. We call for abolishing all laws against such “crimes without victims.” We oppose the efforts of the state to regulate what happens in the privacy of the bedroom. The only guideline that should exist is that of effective consent—that is, mutual agreement and understanding—regardless of age, gender or sexual preference.

The violent abuse and rape of children is a terrible crime. But the willful conflation of Jack the Ripper with Lewis Carroll (or Daniel Guevara Vilca, who may not have even known about the porn on his computer) has destroyed many innocent lives in the service of social reaction. The 2002 film Capturing the Friedmans documented how high school teacher Arnold Friedman and his 19-year-old son Jesse were framed up and jailed in a sex-abuse witchhunt in 1987 after Arnold had been entrapped in a sting operation for purchasing gay child pornography (see our review in WV No. 808, 29 August 2003). Equating looking at pictures with child abuse, the state compelled students and their parents to come forward with unbelievable charges of molestation and rape—without a shred of physical evidence. Arnold committed suicide in prison in 1995, apparently guilt-ridden over his son’s imprisonment. Jesse was finally paroled in 2001 after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence. As for the kids coerced into giving false testimony, their abuse was at the hands of the state.

As we wrote in our review:

“Beginning in the late 1970s a mass panic, manipulated by the state in collusion with the religious fundamentalists and anti-sex feminists, engulfed society for well over a decade. People across the nation were led to believe that there was an epidemic of child molestations, satanic ritual abuse of children and sexual predators hiding behind every teacher’s desk. Hundreds of men and women ended up behind bars for crimes that never happened, when the real criminals sat comfortably in their blue uniforms and black robes.”

Since that time, Democrats and Republicans alike have used the crusade against child porn to extend the reach of the state further into people’s lives. The “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act” working its way through Congress would mandate that Internet service providers keep a record of everyone’s Web browsing for a year, to turn over to the authorities on request. And for Big Brother, it does not even matter if actual images of children are involved, as was upheld in a 2008 Supreme Court ruling. The FBI has carried out its sting operations against people who merely click on hyperlinks for nonexistent child-porn sites. After Vilca’s arrest, Collier County sheriff Kevin Rambosk ranted: “We will find you, we will charge you, and you will be in jail for quite some time” (naplesnews.com, 26 January 2010).

Child-porn sweeps like those in which Vilca and Arnold Friedman were caught up are only a small part of the bourgeoisie’s efforts to regiment the manifold expressions of human sexuality. “Obscenity” laws were used in this country for decades to ban the dissemination of birth control, outlaw homosexuality and silence trenchant social critics such as Lenny Bruce. “Age of consent” laws, which criminalize consensual sexual activity, are wielded in the (vain) attempt to dictate a sexless existence to teens. Teenagers across the country have been hauled off to jail on charges of creation, possession and distribution of child pornography for sexting—sending or receiving suggestive pictures of each other via cell phones or the Internet.

We have a long history of defending those individuals and organizations of all stripes caught in the government’s anti-sex dragnets, including the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), which advocates the right to consensual intergenerational sex. Defense of the freedom to write about sexual matters and of the right to peruse whatever erotica or porn one prefers would seem to be ABC for those claiming to oppose oppression. But NAMBLA, demonized by the ruling class, smeared in the media and subjected to witchhunting prosecutions, has been slandered by gay rights organizations and self-proclaimed “socialists”—including by the Maoists of the Revolutionary Communist Party—as child molesters.

In this, these leftists are imbibing the bourgeois prejudices and social mores that brand as “deviant” anyone who does not conform to the strictures of the monogamous nuclear family. Bolstered by religion, the family is the main instrument for the oppression of women and youth. For the bourgeoisie, it is the vehicle for passing wealth on to the next generation. For workers and the oppressed, the family serves to inculcate obedience and bears the burden of raising the next generation.

The capitalists would like nothing more than to have docile and industrious wage slaves so that they can extract greater profits. The bourgeois hypocrites preach puritanical anti-sex dogma to the masses (including “abstinence only” education in public schools) while they themselves enjoy whatever entertainment money can buy. The capitalist rulers, who can easily pay the costs for their own families, seek to ban the use of public funds for abortion. Any number of films, music and other artistic endeavors that offend some bourgeois moral code may be censored in public but treasured in the private collections of those who can afford to pay.

In what sick mind should the torturers of Abu Ghraib legislate what’s “obscene”? Even as the bourgeoisie raises a hue and cry over protecting kids, real violence is perpetrated daily against children under this brutal capitalist system. The U.S. imperialist ruling class unleashes “kill teams” to hunt down youth in Afghanistan. At home it locks up poor youth, especially blacks and Latinos, in prison hellholes and shoots them down in the streets. It is closing schools and hospitals across the country and evicting families from their homes. More than 1.3 million children are homeless and nearly one in four struggles to get enough to eat.

Only workers revolution can put an end to these and other ravages of capitalism and lay the groundwork for constructing a rational socialist society free of crippling, cruel religious superstition. When the workers are in power, the necessary tasks, such as childcare, that today fall on individual families will be taken up by society as a whole. To lead the proletariat in sweeping away the forces of capitalist reaction, the vanguard party of the working class must struggle against every manifestation of backwardness and oppression. Dedicated to forging such a party, we take up the defense of Daniel Guevara Vilca, who should never have spent a day in prison. Drop all the charges—free him now! I.C.E. hands off!