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

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GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) – Guyana is revisiting its dark history nearly a century after American Reverend Jim Jones and more than 900 of his followers died in rural South America.

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It was the largest massacre in recent history, and a state-backed tourism operator wants to open the now-overgrown ancient site to visitors, a proposal that reopens old wounds, which critics say would be insulting to the victims and exhumed. bad past.

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Jordan Vilchez, who grew up in California and moved to Peoples Temple when he was 14, told The Associated Press in a phone interview from the US that he had mixed feelings about the visit.

He 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. Two sisters and two nephews were among the victims.

“I just remembered dying in one day,” he recalled.

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

“Then on the other hand, I feel that any situation where people are deceived in their death should be treated with respect,” he said.

Vilchez added that he hopes the tour guide will provide context and explain why so many people travel to Guyana hoping for a better life.

The trip would take visitors to the remote Port Kaituma area nestled in the lush green forests of northern Guyana. Travel available only by boat, helicopter or plane; rivers instead of roads connect the interior of Guyana. Once there, it’s another six miles across a hard and overgrown dirt track to an abandoned and farmed area.

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Neville Bissember, a law professor at the University of Guyana, questioned the proposed trip, calling it a “bad and strange idea” in a recently published book.

“What aspect of Guyana’s nature and culture is represented in a place where mass killings by suicide and other atrocities and human rights violations were perpetrated against a submissive group of American citizens, who had nothing to do with Guyana or Guyanese?” he wrote.

Despite ongoing criticism, the tour is strongly supported by the Tourism Authority and Guyana’s Tourism and Hospitality Association.

Tourism Minister Oneidge Walrond told the AP that the government supports the Jonestown effort but is aware of “a certain degree of pushback” from certain sectors of the community.

He said the government had already helped clear the area “to ensure that better produce can be sold,” adding that the visit may require Cabinet approval.

“Of course I support you,” he said. “It’s possible. After all, we have seen what Rwanda has done in this terrible tragedy as an example.”

Rose Sewcharran, director of Wonderlust Adventures, a private tour operator that plans to take tourists to Jonestown, said she was happy with the support.

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“We think it’s time,” he said. “This is happening all over the world. We have many examples of dark, revolutionary tours around the world, including Auschwitz and the Holocaust museum.”

Attractive tourists

The mass killings of November 1978 marked Guyana for decades until the discovery of large amounts of oil and gas off the country’s coast about a decade ago, making it one of the world’s largest oil producers.

New roads, schools and hotels are being built across the capital, Georgetown, and beyond, and a country that rarely saw tourists now hopes to attract more of them.

The obvious attraction to Jonestown, said Astill Paul, a twin-engine pilot who flew Rep. California’s Leo J. Ryan and a US news team in a nearby village a day before hundreds died on Nov. 18, 1978. He saw gunmen shoot and kill Ryan and four others as they tried to board a plane on November 18 and fly back to the capital.

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

“I sat on the tourism board years ago and suggested that we do this, but the minister at the time rejected this idea because the government did not want anything to be associated with unhealthy tourism,” he recalled.

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Until recently, successive governments shunned Jonestown, saying the country’s image had been badly tarnished by the suicides of many, or a few, Native Americans. Most of the victims were Americans like Vilchez who flew to Guyana to track down Jones. Many endured beatings, forced labor, imprisonment and mass suicide training.

Those interested in the tour include Gerry Gouveia, a pilot who also flew when Jonestown was active.

“This place must be rebuilt so that visitors can see for themselves its condition and what happened,” he said. “We have to rebuild Jim Jones’ home, the grandstand and the other buildings that were there.”

Today, all that remains are fragments of a cassava mill, pieces of a large field and a rusty tractor that once pulled a flatbed trailer to take temple members to the Port Kaituma airport.

Contribution to the country

So far, most of the visitors to Jonestown have been journalists and family members of those who died.

Planning a trip on your own is daunting: the area is far from the capital and difficult to access, and some consider the nearest residential area to be dangerous.

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“It’s still a very difficult place,” said Fielding McGehee, co-director of the Jonestown Institute, a nonprofit group. “I don’t see what kind of economic this project will be because of the large amount of money it would take to turn it into a good place to visit.”

McGehee warned against relying on witnesses who will be part of the trip. He said memories and stories passed down from generation to generation may not be accurate.

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

He recalled how one survivor suggested a personal project to rebuild an abandoned site, but those in the temple community said, ‘Why do you want to do that?’

McGehee noted that black tourism is popular, and that going to Jonestown means visitors can claim to have visited a place where more than 900 people died on the same day.

He said: “It’s a bad desire for disaster.

When the tour finally starts working, not everything will be visible to the tourists.

When Vilchez returned to Guyana in 2018 for the first time since the massacre, he made a donation to that country when he arrived in Jonestown.

Among the things he buried in the abandoned village where his sisters and nieces died were bits of hair from his mother and father, who did not go to Jonestown.

“It just seems like it’s an act of respect for the people who died,” he said.

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Coto 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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