The site of the largest suicide-murder in recent history could soon become a tourist attraction.
Guyana is revisiting its dark past nearly half a century after U.S. Rev. Jim Jones and more than 900 of his followers died in the rural interior of the country.
That’s if a government-backed tour operator gets his way.
The plan is to open the former commune, now shrouded by lush vegetation, to visitors. A proposal that is reopening old wounds, with critics saying it would disrespect victims and dig up a sordid past.
Jordan Vilchez, who grew up in California and was moved into the Peoples Temple commune at age 14, said that she has mixed feelings about the tour.
She was in Guyana’s capital the day Jones ordered hundreds of his followers to drink a poisoned grape-flavored drink that was given to children first. Her two sisters and two nephews were among the victims.
“I just missed dying by one day,” she recalled.
Vilchez, 67, said Guyana has every right to profit from any plans related to Jonestown.
“Then on the other hand, I just feel like any situation where people were manipulated into their deaths should be treated with respect,” she said.
Vilchez added that she hopes the tour operator would provide context and explain why so many people went to Guyana trusting they would find a better life.
The tour would ferry visitors to the far-flung village of Port Kaituma nestled in the lush jungles of northern Guyana. It’s a trip available only by boat, helicopter or plane; rivers instead of roads connect Guyana’s interior. Once there, it’s another six miles via a rough and overgrown dirt trail to the abandoned commune and former agricultural settlement.
Neville Bissember, a law professor at the University of Guyana, questioned the proposed tour, calling it a “ghoulish and bizarre” idea in a recently published letter.
“What part of Guyana’s nature and culture is represented in a place where death by mass suicide and other atrocities and human rights violations were perpetuated against a submissive group of American citizens, which had nothing to do with Guyana nor Guyanese?” he wrote.
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