Few Guyanese care to recall the deaths of more than 900 followers of an American cult leader in their jungle commune 15 years ago. In fact, they hope its anniversary today passes with little notice.
Residents who live near the rusting farm equipment and furniture that were part of the 300 acres carved from rain forest and called Jonestown are more concerned about finding jobs with its newest foreign occupant, an Asian timber enterprise. Even that South Korean-Malaysian company wants nothing to do it."We don't plan to touch it at all," said Lloyd Searwar, a spokesman for Barama Co. Ltd., whose concession includes the former commune. "All we have done is to improve the road passing on the outside of it for our purposes."
About the only people interested are local entrepreneurs and the 13-month-old administration of President Cheddi Jagan. Next month, a government-appointed tourist board will start looking at proposals to turn the site, now nearly covered with tropical undergrowth, into a tourist attraction.
Fleeing allegations of misconduct, the Rev. Jim Jones led followers of his San Francisco-based Peoples Temple in 1977 to Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America. The cult leader believed he would be safe from what he perceived as media and police persecution.
In Jonestown, he and his followers built cottages, workshops and dormitories in tidy rows, grew fruit and vegetables and raised chickens and pigs on land 200 miles northwest of the capital.
Late the next year, U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan, D-Calif., flew to Guyana to investigate reports of abuse in the cult. Jones' followers killed Ryan, three journalists and a temple defector and wounded 11 in an ambush at Port Kaituma airport.
Jones had held monthly suicide rehearsals. On Nov. 18, 1978, just hours after Ryan was killed, he directed his followers to drink grape-flavored punch laced with potassium cyanide. Some were forced to take the poison, some were shot to death. In all, 912 followers died.
Jones had a bullet wound in his head. It is not known whether he was shot or committed suicide.
"It was an American tragedy that occurred on our soil . . . within our borders," former Prime Minister Hamilton Green told The Associated Press on Wednesday, defending the decision by the former government to allow Jones to set up the cult in this country.
He says it says something about America that a group would have left the comforts of home to set up a new life in virgin territory.
"Something was missing in the American way of life for that to happen," he said. "It is something for scholars to ponder."