Chapter 12
It was almost the perfect place. Say ‘Mexico’ and the northern mind thinks of arid desert with its irregular carpet of scrub and cactus. Yet the highlands to the south and west, such as here by Lake Chapala, are green and temperate, warm all year round with no painful extremes. It was this, as well as the cheap housing and medical care, that had attracted an army of Canadian and American retirees in the 1950s, who came to build a replica of American civilisation along the shoreline of the lake, and it was this, too, that had drawn Jon Schillaci from New Hampshire. That, and the fact he was being hunted by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was almost like home. There was a large expatriate community, although he avoided them for obvious reasons. All that marred the perfection were the grisly remains left on the state border by the warring drug cartels, as they battled for control of the drug routes. Et in arcadia ego – there is death in paradise too.
The computer, as Mark Gado said, has turned out to be the greatest single advance in the history of pedophilia. According to Holmes and Holmes, there are four ways in which pedophiles use the net: to traffic in child pornography, to locate victims, to communicate with potential victims, and to communicate with each other.
With the advent of Wikipedia, we can now add a fifth way: to normalise, to justify and to celebrate adult-child relationships in articles published on the sixth largest website on the planet. Leaked emails show that the Wikipedia pedophile campaign was conducted openly between 2004 and 2007, and less visibly after the administration secretly introduced a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy in 2007. “I am not an advocate of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the US military. I think it is a bad policy in that case. But in OUR situation it seems to me to be just about right”, says Jimbo.
After that, the campaign is largely carried on in secret, using an army of ‘sockpuppets’ – disposable accounts facilitated by Wikipedia’s policy of ‘anyone can edit’. “When they talk about trying to solve the ‘pedophile’ problem, my only message is this: You can’t. You’ve already lost”, says one activist. “Ask Ernie Allen and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: more of us are having sex with your kids than ever before. All your money, all your laws, all your daytime talk shows, and all your therapy: worthless. There are more of us than ever; you’re fighting a hydra. Cut off one head and two more spring up in its place”.
