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Jordan Vilchez, who moved to the People’s Temple sect’s settlement in Guyana as a 14-year-old, has mixed feelings about the tourism project. Picture taken in 2018.
1 / 3 Photo: Jeff Chiu/AP/TT
More than 900 people died in what has been called the largest mass suicide in history. Now the government of Guyana wants to turn the site of the Jonestown massacre into a tourist attraction.
Macabre, some say. About time, others think.
The images cabled out of the Guyana jungle in November 1978 shocked the world. Motionless bodies lay in drifts on the grass, holes and noises, as if they had fallen from the sky.
Those who followed cult leader Jim Jones from the USA to Guyana had been promised a tropical socialist paradise free from the evils of the outside world. Instead, they met death in a glass of grape juice laced with cyanide and sedatives. To this day, it is unclear how many of the victims took their own lives and how many were forced to drink the poison – or shot or injected to death.
Now the South American country wants to attract tourists to the site. The proposal tears up wounds.
Hope for context
Jordan Vilchez, who became a member of the Christian sect People’s Temple as a 14-year-old, has mixed feelings. Guyana’s government has the right to profit from Jonestown, she told AP.
– On the other hand, I feel that all places where people have been tricked into their deaths should be treated with respect.
Vilchez escaped death by one day: she was in Guyana’s capital the day Jim Jones ordered his followers to drink the poisonous cocktail. Her two sisters and two nephews died.
The 67-year-old hopes potential visitors are provided with context to the disaster, so they understand why people flocked to Jonestown in hopes of a better life.
For Neville Bissember, professor of law at the University of Guyana, the project is completely the wrong way to attract tourists to the country. In an open letter, he calls the idea “macabre and bizarre”.
“Pleasant interest”
“What part of the nature and culture of Guyana is represented in a place where death by collective suicide and other abuses and violations were carried out against a subjugated group of American citizens, who had nothing to do with Guyana or the Guyanese?”, he writes.
During the tour, visitors will be taken by ferry to the remote village of Port Kaituma in the jungles of northern Guyana. From there it’s just under a mile via overgrown dirt roads to abandoned Jonestown.
The country’s tourism minister, Oneidge Walrond, supports the proposal, she tells AP – and compares it to tourism in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide.
Fielding McGehee of the non-profit organization The Jonestown Institute, however, is not convinced. Shipping tourists in doesn’t help anyone understand what happened in Jonestown, he told the AP:
– This is about a lustful interest in tragedy.
FACTS Sunday cults
Over the years, several extremist religious communities have committed so-called collective suicide. Often, at the same time, it has rather been a matter of mass murder, when the victims acted under coercion and manipulation, and cult leaders in many cases killed those who did not want to kill themselves. Here are some examples:
Jonestown, Guyana, 1978: Over 900 people in the People’s Temple sect, including leader Jim Jones, die in their jungle retreat, mostly from cyanide poisoning. Almost a third of the victims are children.
Waco, USA, 1993: 76 people die when the Sect of David, led by David Koresh, sets fire to their ranch after being under siege by the FBI for two months.
Switzerland/Canada, 1994: Murder and mass suicide using poison, firearms and arson kills around 100 members of the Order of the Sun Temple.
San Diego, USA, 1997: 39 members of the UFO sect Heaven’s Gate commit suicide using alcohol and sleeping pills, at the same time that comet Hale-Bopp passes the Earth.
Kanungu, Uganda, 2000: A group called the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments burns themselves inside their church. Over 300 members die, after which even more dead are found murdered in mass graves in the area.
Shakahola, Kenya, 2023: 110 dead bodies are found in Shakahola Forest near Malindi, Kenya. Survivors say they were forced to starve themselves on the orders of cult leader Paul Nthenge Mackenzie. Another 300+ bodies are later found. Mackenzie is on trial for murder, manslaughter and torture in a trial that is still ongoing.
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