An American tourist, Sean Traverse, posing for photos during a tour to the site of the Jonestown settlement in Guyana. Photo / Federico Rios, The New York Times
Both American survivors of the mass suicide and murder and Guyanese have criticised the tour. But defenders say the site offers important lessons.
What makes a tragedy worth revisiting?
Nearly 50 years after the mass murder-suicide in the settlement known as Jonestown, all that remains in the remote Guyanese jungle is a small clearing. The wooden and zinc structures that once housed about 1000 members of Peoples Temple, the religious group founded by Jim Jones, have long ago been scavenged or vanished beneath vines.
A single plaque, installed in 2009, marks the site of one of history’s deadliest cult tragedies, where more than 900 people died on November 18, 1978, after Jones ordered his followers to commit suicide – an event that shocked the world.
After decades of hesitation over how to handle Jonestown’s legacy, which many Guyanese see as a stain on their small South American nation, a new tour allows visitors to confront the traumatic event.
The Jonestown Memorial Tour, operated by a Guyanese company called Wanderlust Adventures GY, offers a US$750 ($1,300) trip that includes a flight from the capital, Georgetown, a bumpy hour-long van ride and a night in the nearby mining town of Port Kaituma.
The tour has provoked backlash from Guyanese eager to shed any association with Jonestown, named for Jones, and from survivors who say commodifying what happened there is lurid.
One survivor, John Cobb, 65, called it “a money grab to capitalise on a tragedy”. He happened to be in the Guyanese capital during the mass deaths, but 11 relatives, including his mother and five siblings, died.
The company’s owner, Roselyn Sewcharran, said the goal was not sensationalism but education about “the dangers of manipulation, unchecked authority and the circumstances that led to this devastating event”.
Sewcharran, who was born and raised in Guyana, studied sociology and founded her tour company five years ago. Repeated requests from foreign travellers interested in visiting Jonestown led to the idea for a tour.
“I’ve always been curious about social issues and their impact,” she said. “There genuinely was a desire to learn more about this significant chapter of our past.”
She soon brought Chris Persaud on as a guide.
Persaud, who works as an information technology consultant, said his grandfather, a Guyanese journalist, had been invited to Jonestown by the team of a visiting lawmaker, Representative Leo Ryan, D-California, but he declined, sensing danger. Persaud said he sees his role as continuing his grandfather’s legacy of storytelling.
On a sweltering Saturday earlier this year, Sewcharran led an inaugural tour. As leaves crunched underfoot, she paused at the entrance, where a replica of the original “Welcome to Jonestown” sign stands.
“I’d just like us to take a moment of silence for all the lives lost,” she said.
Persaud explained how Jones – a preacher described by many of his followers as charismatic and who spoke about racial equality – founded Peoples Temple in Indiana in 1955, before moving to California.
In 1977, Jones, with hundreds of followers, moved to Guyana to build what he portrayed as a self-sufficient, interracial community amid mounting US legal investigations and media scrutiny over accusations against Jones of physical abuse and financial fraud.
Adherents handed over their life savings, passports and possessions and laboured 12 hours a day as Jones grew increasingly paranoid.
On November 17, 1978, Ryan went to Jonestown after relatives of people in the settlement reported claims of abuse. The next day, as he and several group members attempted to leave, followers of Jones opened fire at the Port Kaituma airstrip, killing Ryan, three journalists and a Peoples Temple member.
That afternoon, anticipating that the killing of a US Congress member would mean the end of Jonestown, Jones orchestrated a mass murder-suicide, commanding followers to drink cyanide-laced punch under threat from armed guards. Some were forcibly given poison with syringes. Jones died alongside them.
Persaud and Sewcharran spent two years researching the event, travelling to the site and interviewing locals familiar with what happened.
Today, the area is largely barren, but they hope to add signs and a small museum.
A previous effort to turn Jonestown into a tourism site earlier this century fizzled.
“It’s a niche market,” Sewcharran said. “It’s not for everyone.”
Guyana, an English-speaking country bordering Venezuela, has a booming oil sector and an influx of foreigners with disposable income, so the country’s small tourism industry is trying to expand offerings like ecotourism, said Dee George, president of Guyana’s tourism association.
Jonestown, she added, “is part of us, whether we like it or not”.
Still, some Guyanese want to move on. For years they say, many foreigners have either confused Guyana with Ghana, or associated it with Jonestown.
Kit Nascimento, 93, a Guyanese government spokesperson at the time of the massacre, said opening the site revives an image that had been fading.
The mass deaths were an American tragedy that happened to occur on Guyanese soil, he said.
“It’s of no consequence whatsoever to the current population,” he said. “And I don’t think we have a particular responsibility to teach the world about cults.”
The inaugural tour conducted by Sewcharran included two of her relatives, two journalists and two tourists: a 66-year-old Norwegian executive and Sean Traverse, 48, a fulltime traveller from California.
Traverse said there was an inconsistency in how “dark tourism” is perceived, noting that tourists also visit Auschwitz and the Colosseum.
He said he had spent years trying to visit Jonestown, even reaching out to bush pilots for price quotes. When he heard about the new tour he was the first to sign up.
He grew up in Ventura County, California, and said he spent part of his childhood in the Church Universal and Triumphant, a New Age group that sought to build a self-sufficient community to survive an expected nuclear apocalypse and drew criticism for some of its actions. A California court awarded a former member $1.56 million in damages, citing coercion from the group to hand over his life’s savings.
Traverse said he understood the appeal of the Jonestown community and how groups like Peoples Temple can turn abusive.
Being at the site of so much horror and confronting how easily people – including his own family – could be drawn into manipulative movements, overwhelmed him, he said.
“I’ve had experience of people being in groups that were super positive until they weren’t,” he said.
He said Jonestown remains relevant because he believes many Americans are experiencing a spiritual void that cults claim to fill. “I don’t think it’s far-fetched that it could happen again,” Traverse said.
In the clearing where Jonestown once stood, Persaud explained how Jones sought to lure poor and marginalised followers by making promises to build a society free from racism, poverty and addiction.
“We see how remote this area is,” Persaud told visitors sweating under the beating sun. “So imagine how bad these persons’ lives had to be, that this seemed like a better option.”
Over the buzz of cicadas he played a grainy sermon recording in which Jones claimed to heal a blind woman as people cheer and sing.
Later he passed around a photo of Jones beneath a sign that read: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Persaud pointed out different locations to visitors.
“Here is where the grand pavilion was,” he told the group. “Now it’s just dense vegetation. You fly overhead, you would never believe that this once housed a thousand people.”
People who lived in Port Kaituma had been wary of the Jonestown group, Persaud said, but sometimes bought food from them and visited their medical clinic.
In interviews, reactions by residents of the small town to the tour ranged from bemusement to indifference. Some said the area was haunted and most try to avoid it.
“It’s a nice idea, but it’s not something to remember,” said Tiffany Daniels, 32, who owns a restaurant. “It’s just bad energy. It’s a lot of lives.”
Her daughter Serena, 11, found it strange that tourists would pay to visit.
“I would not like to go there,” she said. “At all.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Genevieve Glatsky
Photographs by: Federico Rios
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