More than 900 people died in Jonestown. Guyana wants to turn it into a tourist attraction

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GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) — Guyana is revisiting a dark history nearly a half-century after the death of American pastor Jim Jones and more than 900 of his followers in the South American nation’s rural interior.

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It was the largest murder-suicide in modern history, and a government-backed tourism company wants to open the former town now shrouded in lush vegetation to visitors, a proposal that reopens old wounds that critics say disrespects the victims and digs up a sordid past.

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Jordan Vilchez, who grew up in California and moved to the Peoples Temple community at age 14, told The Associated Press in a phone interview from the United States that she had mixed feelings about the tour.

She was in Guyana’s capital on the day Jones ordered hundreds of his followers to drink a poisoned grape-flavored drink that was first given to children. Among the victims were her two sisters and two nephews.

“I missed death by one day,” she recalled.

Vilchez, 67, said Guyana had every right to benefit from any plans related to Jonestown.

“On the other hand, I feel that any situation where people are manipulated to their death should be treated with respect,” she said.

Vilches added that she hopes the tour company will provide context and explain why so many people go to Guyana confident they will find a better life.

The tour will take visitors to the remote village of Port Kaituma nestled in the lush forests of northern Guyana. It’s a trip only available by boat, helicopter or plane; Rivers rather than roads connect the interior of Guyana. Once there, you’ll drive another six miles over a rough, overgrown dirt road to the abandoned town and former agricultural settlement.

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Neville Besembre, a law professor at the University of Guyana, questioned the proposed tour, calling it an “outrageous and bizarre” idea in a recent letter.

“What part of Guyana’s nature and culture is it a place where death by mass suicide and other atrocities and human rights violations are committed against a subjugated group of American citizens, which have nothing to do with Guyana nor Guyanese?” books.

Despite ongoing criticism, the tour has strong support from the Government Tourism Authority and the Guyana Tourism and Hospitality Association.

Tourism Minister Onidge Walrond told the AP that the government supports the efforts in Jonestown but is aware of “a certain level of pushback” from certain sectors of society.

The government has already helped clear the area “to ensure a better product can be marketed,” she said, adding that the tour may need Cabinet approval.

“She definitely has my support,” she said. “It is possible. After all, we saw what Rwanda did with this terrible tragedy as an example.

Rose Sucharan, director of Wonderlust Adventures, the private tour company planning to bring visitors to Jonestown, said she was pleased with the support.

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“We think the time has come,” she said. “This is happening all over the world. We have multiple examples of dark and morbid tourism all over the world, including Auschwitz and the Holocaust Museum.

Lure tourists

The November 1978 mass murder-suicide was synonymous with Guyana for decades until massive amounts of oil and gas were discovered off the country’s coast nearly a decade ago, making it one of the world’s largest offshore oil producers.

New roads, schools and hotels are being built across the capital, Georgetown, and beyond, and the country that rarely sees tourists is hoping to attract more of them.

The obvious attraction is Jonestown, said Astill Ball, co-pilot of the twin-engine plane that took US Rep. Leo J. Ryan of California and a US news crew to a village near the town a day before hundreds died in November. On November 18, 1978, gunmen shot and killed Ryan and four others as they attempted to board the plane on November 18 and return to the capital.

Paul told the AP that he believes the former municipality should be developed as a heritage site.

“I sat on the tourism board years ago and suggested we do it, but the minister at the time criticized the idea because the government didn’t want anything to do with sick tourism,” he recalls.

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Until recently, successive governments had avoided Jonestown, arguing that the country’s image had been badly damaged by mass killings and suicides, although only a small number of indigenous people died. The vast majority of the victims were Americans like Vilchez who traveled to Guyana to follow Jones. Many of them were subjected to beatings, forced labour, imprisonment and mass suicide training.

Among those supporting the tour is Jerry Gouveia, a pilot who also flew when Jonestown was active.

“The area should be rebuilt just so tourists can get a first-hand understanding of its design and what happened,” he said. “We should rebuild the Jim Jones house, the master suite and the other buildings that were there.”

Today, all that remains are parts of the cassava mill, pieces of the main pavilion, and a rusty tractor that once pulled a flatbed trailer to transport temple members to Port Kaituma Airport.

A sacrifice to the earth

So far, most visitors to Jonestown have been reporters and family members of the victims.

Organizing an excursion on your own is daunting: the area is far from the capital and difficult to reach, and some consider the nearest inhabited settlement dangerous.

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“It’s still a very difficult area,” said Fielding McGee, co-director of the Johnstown Institute, a nonprofit group. “I don’t see how this type of project would be economically viable because of the huge amounts of money it would take to turn it into a place to visit.”

McGee warned against relying on supposed witnesses who will be part of the tour. He said that memories and stories passed down through generations may not be accurate.

“It’s almost like a game of telephone,” he said. “It doesn’t help anyone understand what happened in Jonestown.”

He recalled how one of the survivors proposed a personal project to develop the abandoned site, but those from the temple community said: “Why would you want to do that?”

Dark tourism is very popular, McGee noted, and going to Jonestown means tourists can say they visited a place where more than 900 people died on the same day.

“It’s the lustful interest in tragedy,” he said.

If the tour eventually starts running, not everything will be visible to tourists.

When Vilches returned to Guyana in 2018 for the first time since the mass murder-suicide, she made an offering to the land when she arrived in Jonestown.

Among the things she buried in the deserted town where her sisters and nephews died were scraps of hair from her mother and father, who had never been to Jonestown.

“It seemed like a gesture to honor the people who died,” she said.

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Cotto reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico.

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Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

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