Port Kaituma, Guyana (CNN) — Dark storm clouds broke to reveal a dense Amazonian rainforest outside the window of the 13-seat Cessna prop plane. Massive trees, in every shade of green, blanketed the landscape.
We were closing in on the airstrip where, nearly 50 years ago, followers of the Reverend Jim Jones killed US Congressman Leo Ryan. He had come to the remote settlement of Jonestown to investigate claims that some of the church’s members, nearly all Americans, many from his district in San Francisco, were being held against their will.
Rain leaking from the plane door fell onto the laminated safety card tucked in the back of the pilot’s seat in front of me. The illustration noted the location of two first aid kits and two “survival kits.”
Then we touched down on the same rural runway where Congressman Ryan and four other Americans were the first casualties in the largest incident of civilian deaths in US history after the terror attacks of 9/11.
People unload cargo after a plane arrives at the Port Kaituma airstrip in Guyana.
We were among the first travelers to be taken by tour guides to this dense patch of Guyanese jungle where more than 900 American members of the Peoples Temple church (or, more fairly, cult) — about 300 of them children — lost their lives in a mass murder-suicide.
Guyana has, for the first time, given its blessing for a tour company to start bringing visitors into what’s left of Jonestown. This shift has its critics, even as the country decides how to tell the story of how and why the massacre happened. There are other questions too: What might we learn from it? How much will visitors get to see if they come? Will there be a museum or large memorial erected? Signs posted to mark former buildings? Or will some of the old structures and signs be recreated? All of that is still to be written in a new chapter of this tragic and horrific story.
Whatever is built or conveyed, Jonestown could be part of a lucrative segment of the tourism industry often referred to as dark tourism. It may join locations such as New York’s Ground Zero, Cambodia’s Killing Fields and former Nazi concentration camps, all places where people gather to learn and honor, but also take selfies and purchase souvenirs.
The airstrip
Today there are scheduled passenger flights nearly every day from the Guyanese capital of Georgetown to the tiny jungle airstrip of Port Kaituma. Small propeller planes carry as many passengers as supplies, including bins of fluffy yellow chicks and crop seedlings. The passenger next to me balanced a soccer-themed birthday cake from the big city on her lap.
Originally cut from the jungle for military use, the sparse landing strip has no control tower or runway lights for night flights. And in 1978 you would have had to charter a plane to fly in or out. Even if there had been commercial flights for a Jonestown resident to leave on, Jim Jones held their money and passports.
Congressman Ryan and his team were there on behalf of concerned stateside relatives of the church members. He was investigating reports that their loved ones were trapped 4,500 miles from home, some kept under sedation and physically abused.
In addition to two staffers and four concerned relatives of Jonestown residents, Ryan brought with him to Jonestown nine journalists: reporters from The Washington Post, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle and the National Enquirer, and a television crew from NBC. If the allegations against Jones had merit, Ryan wanted the world to know.
From left, Patty Houston, Phyllis Houston, Carol Boyd, Rep. Ryan and Judy Houston pose for a picture in Jonestown. Phyllis’s father, Sam Houston, was friends with Ryan and reportedly brought his concerns about the Peoples Temple to the Congressman. Phyllis, Patty and Judy all died in Jonestown. (Everett/Shutterstock)
Journalists were among those who traveled with Congressman Ryan to Jonestown. Cameraman Bob Brown, photographer Greg Robinson and reporter Don Harris were killed. (Everett/Shutterstock)
After a heated and nearly deadly confrontation inside Jonestown — Ryan was briefly held at knifepoint by a member — Ryan’s entourage left with 16 defectors, among them an impostor, Larry Layton.
Jones sent Layton on a suicide mission. Pretending to be a defector, he was to shoot the pilot when they were over the jungle. But the group was too large to leave on a single plane and a second was called. And while they debated who would take off first, gunmen arrived in a tractor-pulled flatbed and opened fire.
A dozen or so houses now line the airstrip, but behind them is the same dense, tall jungle where some members of the Congressional entourage fled and survived. No plaque honors the five Americans killed: Ryan, journalists Greg Robinson of the Examiner, Bob Brown and Don Harris from NBC, and defector Patricia Parks.
Congressional aide Jackie Speier, who herself became a Congresswoman from 2008 to 2023, survived five gunshot wounds and a night on the runway before a rescue plane arrived the next morning.
While Speier lay bleeding on the tarmac, Jones executed a plan he had long been preparing for. Over the years, he told his followers they must be willing to die for the church, for him, and even had them demonstrate their loyalty by downing a harmless drink he said was laced with poison. But this time, Jones explained to residents over the speaker system, that because of the murders at the airstrip, “We can’t go back.”
As we pulled away in a van from the small runway, unseen howler monkeys screeched from the nearby jungle. An eerie welcome party.
Boats are seen at dusk along the Kaituma River.
Up the river
As Jonestown was being carved out of the jungle, most of its residents arrived on the Cudjoe, a wooden fishing trawler used to shuttle people and supplies on a two-day journey between Georgetown on the Atlantic coast, then down the Kaituma River. The boat was named after a famous runaway slave in Jamaica.
During Jonestown’s era of 1974 to 1978, about 200 people lived in Port Kaituma, said local resident Clement Adams. “I was 11 years old during the massacre,” he said as we sipped bottles of Guyanese-brewed Banks beer on a metal-roof covered patio in Port Kaituma overlooking the river. Adams recalled Temple members selling goods in the local market area, and he played games with the Jonestown kids. He had an impression they were all happy, though he was not free to wander around the compound when he visited, he said. His sister had an emergency dental problem at the time which Jonestown helped care for. “I got my first pair of socks as a gift from Jonestown,” Adams said.
People walk through Port Kaituma’s main thoroughfare.
Although the population is now estimated at more than 6,000, Port Kaituma hasn’t changed much in recent decades. Boats still come and go all day. There’s a small, muddy trash-strewn dock for loading and unloading that the Cudjoe used in its time. The town’s main thoroughfare is still a warren of pedestrian alleys lined with simple eateries and shops. “We Buy Gold” reads one store’s sign. When we first arrived on our morning flight, breakfast was a plate of chana (cooked chickpeas), potato-like boiled cassava, plantains and grilled veggies — the culinary flair largely confined to the spices.
They don’t see many visitors in Port Kaituma who aren’t working for the local mining and lumber industries. We stood out. Roselyn Sewcharran, owner and founder of Wanderlust Adventures GY which conducted the tour, said we were among the very first tourists there.
Roselyn Sewcharran is the founder and owner of Wanderlust Adventures GY.
Port Kaituma resident Clement Adams was 11 years old when the massacre occurred.
Guyana exudes a laid-back Caribbean hospitality and familiarity. Sewcharran introduced us to local shopkeepers by calling them “aunty.” One woman demonstrated how they make flour from the abundant cassava, once a staple of the Jonestown diet. Another let us try cassava bread, which was reminiscent of the church wafers of my Catholic school days.
Adams, now a Guyanese Ministry of Labor representative for the region, joined us on the 11-kilometer (7-mile) bone-rattling drive out to the Jonestown settlement. Between the giant potholes and massive trucks belonging to a Chinese mining company, the short distance took nearly an hour. But if it wasn’t for the local industries needing it, the road to Jonestown might have been swallowed up by jungle long ago.
A sign welcomes visitors to the former Jonestown site.
The Promised Land
“Welcome to Jonestown” a sign reads in large green letters, spanning the one-lane road winding into the jungle. The original sign added “Peoples Temple Agricultural Project.” The sign that greets visitors today was created by the local Neighborhood Democratic Council (NDC) in 2009.
“Locals avoid going to Jonestown,” Adams said. Too superstitious, he explained. He had been there as a kid the Sunday before the massacre, heard the shots at the airstrip, and saw the gunmen pass through town. Now he and the rest of our group disembarked from the van, walked under the sign and into the woods.
Fifty years ago, the view would have been of a lively settlement, painstakingly cut out of the jungle by Peoples Temple “pioneers.” With little more than machetes, they started clearing the 3,800 acres Jones leased from Guyana at 25 cents an acre (just under $1,000 total) a year. He and his followers called it Jonestown and also the PL, or The Promised Land.
What Jones had “promised” his followers was a socialist agricultural utopia where they could escape the racism and capitalist vices of America. And he sold them on this vision with intentionally misleading home movies showing off happy pioneers, abundant food and cute cabins. The films were screened as marketing tools back in San Francisco.
What later arrivals actually experienced was more of a work camp — not enough food, crowded and sparsely furnished dorms, toilets with no privacy and severe punishments for insubordination. Surrounded by a jungle full of other dangers — snakes, jaguars, piranha, poisonous insects, monkeys, fictitious armed mercenaries — Jonestown became a prison to its residents.
Little evidence of their hard work remains today. In the massacre’s wake, the local Arawak indigenous people and gold miners scavenged any useful materials and the jungle largely swallowed what was left.
Clement Adams looks on as Chris Persaud of Wanderlust Adventures GY uses a machete to clear a downed tree branch from the trail.
Our guides, Chris Persaud of Wanderlust Adventures GY, and Carl Daniels, spent the weeks before our visit cutting trails to Jonestown ruins. Other than giant truck tires, the artifacts were all rusty metal edifices. We saw the skeletal remains of a large flatbed truck, a smaller Ford pick-up and assorted machinery. Embossed letters on a lathe told us it originated in a Cincinnati milling machine company. One ingeniously welded concoction of pipes and oil barrels was a soap factory, Persaud surmised, though on a map it looked closer to the location of the kitchen. A giant mixer was left over from a cassava mill, Adams said with certainty. He later pointed to an overgrown area he knew to be the location of a playground where he once played.
You can look at an aerial photo of Jonestown or a map of its layout, as we did there, and use the road and one major clearing to orient yourself. The playground was on it. We could point to woods where there was a basketball court, a sawmill, and the direction of Jim Jones’ house.
Standing before a tangle of trees, a red-bladed machete in hand, Persaud declared, “Here is where Mr. Muggs’ cage was,” referring to Jonestown’s pet chimpanzee. More clearly, we could see the outline of former Jonestown buildings by the bright green long-leafed plants growing in a conspicuously straight row along the jungle floor.
Foliage grows on what’s left of a rusty pick-up truck at the former Jonestown site.
A plant grows through the remains of a truck bed.
An old tractor was also at the site.
I pressed into the woods, alone, against the guides’ instruction. After about 30 feet, past dark termite nests the size of beehives hanging at eye-level, I turned around. In just a few minutes I had lost sight of our group and was briefly if unnervingly unsure which way I’d come.
There is one spot that’s fully cleared out: the location of Jonestown’s pavilion. The large structure was the center of the community. Sermons and other proclamations were made from Jones’ throne of a chair on its stage. And it was the spot to which all the residents were called on that fateful day in ‘78. They were instructed to drink from a vat of sedative-laced, grape-flavored, sodium cyanide, told it would mean a quick death.
It has been falsely rumored that the pavilion area was clear of jungle growth because the cyanide escaping hundreds of corpses also poisoned the ground. But it’s the local NDC that regularly cuts back vegetation. In 2009, the same group also erected the only memorial currently in Jonestown.
A memorial was erected in a clearing where Jonestown’s pavilion once stood.
“In memory of the victims of the Jonestown tragedy” reads a plaque on a large, white tombstone-like structure sitting at the pavilion location.
The reader can decide who the victims were. Certainly the children. Of the roughly 900 dead, about 300 were kids, all murdered by their parents and caregivers, most with a syringe squirt of the poison into their mouths.
Of the other 600 or so, it’s not known how many willingly “drank the Kool-Aid” — a famously incorrect detail in early Jonestown tragedy reporting; it was actually a cheaper powdered drink brand called Flavor Aid — and how many were forced to drink by threat of the armed guards. Some victims even showed evidence that they had not drunk the poison but were injected with it instead. A few, including Jim Jones himself, died by a gunshot to the head. No one is certain who pulled the trigger.
Guyana denied a request from the US to bury the Jonestown dead in a mass grave, in situ. Instead, they were repatriated and most buried in a mass grave at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California. Jim Jones’ body was cremated in the US and the ashes scattered in the Atlantic Ocean.
Before arriving, I anticipated feeling disturbed or creeped out standing in a spot where so many had died in such a ghastly fashion. Instead, in the middle of the pavilion clearing, my overwhelming emotion was deep sadness. Jim Jones gained power by offering his multiracial and idealistic congregation a vision of a more peaceful, egalitarian society. But their lives ended in an opposite reality.
When you reach Guyana’s heart of darkness, it is quiet, save for the muted noises of animals and insects. In that silence and that space, I felt sorrowfully connected to the immensity of what was lost on November 18, 1978.
Flowers bloom in the Port Kaituma jungle.
The plaque at the pavilion memorial reads, “In memory of the victims of the Jonestown tragedy.”
The Villa
More loss followed. In the capital city of Georgetown, the Peoples Temple owned a house they called the Villa. Located in the affluent Lamaha Gardens neighborhood, the yellow, two-story building looks much as it did in the late ‘70s when members used it as a base.
Those staying at the Villa organized the shipping of goods from the capital and made connections to curry favor with American embassy and Guyanese government officials. The house had a short-wave radio room in constant contact with Jonestown, 240 kilometers (130 miles) away.
A young woman was accepting a food delivery as I approached the front gate and introduced myself. “Are you here about Jonestown?” she asked, clocking me by the name of my employer.
Madison Singh, 21, grew up in the house but her parents never told her about its history. She found out as a teenager when another visitor came to see it and told her. She went online to learn about Jonestown and the Villa, and now her friends make Kool-Aid jokes to her.
The former Peoples Temple Villa in Georgetown is now just another residential home.
“I don’t mind people being curious,” Singh said of visitors, as CNN photographer Will Lanzoni took photos. She enjoys looking at old pictures of her house from that era, she said.
As Singh went back inside, I could see into the downstairs floor where the radio room — used by Jones and others to communicate coded instructions — was located. In her book, “Seductive Poison,” Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton, sister of Larry, shares the layout of the house and what happened there on the day of the mass deaths.
Jim Jones radioed the Villa and instructed Temple member Sharon Amos who was staying there with her children, that all members were to kill themselves by any available means. Amos grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen and locked herself and her 10-, 11- and 21-year-old children in the Villa’s bathroom. Two of Jones’ sons were also staying at the Villa, along with the rest of the Jonestown basketball team, and failed to stop Amos from cutting the throats of her children and then her own.
The Pegasus Hotel in Georgetown.
The team didn’t take their own lives, as instructed, and also refused to follow Jones’ order to go to the Pegasus Hotel, where the families of church members who had come with Congressman Ryan were staying, and kill them.
The Pegasus stands today. When I booked my room, I chose “Mr.” as a prefix to my name, but noted that “Rev.” was also an option.
My pie slice-shaped room in the circular Pegasus was two doors down from the President Jimmy Carter Suite. I watched the sun set over the Atlantic Ocean while a Guyanese TV channel was airing the 1988 PBS series, “The Power of Myth.” Journalist Bill Moyers and myth expert Joseph Campbell were discussing death, and the value it holds in understanding life.
At their best, this is what memorials and history museums offer their visitors. They guide us through a journey from shock and sadness to an understanding of the fragility and duality of human nature, so that we can learn to harness it for good and prevent it from turning to evil.
People look out at the ocean in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana.
Guyana and Jonestown, an uneasy relationship
How did a multicultural, socialist-leaning, scandal-plagued cult-church from California end up in Guyana?
Of all the places Jim Jones could have set up shop, he found his Promised Land in a small South American country that’s about 90% Amazon rainforest, for a few reasons. First, when they gained independence from the similar-sized Britain in 1966, the independent Guyanese government became socialist, and therefore simpatico with Jonestown’s stated mission.
Guyana’s British history means cars there drive on the left side of the road, but being the only English-speaking country in South America was another plus for the Americans moving there.
Officials were also likely eager to have Americans living near Port Kaituma because it’s less than 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the at-times-disputed border with Venezuela. The settlement would be a bulwark to an invasion, the commonly held theory goes.
The Port Kaituma airstrip is seen through the cockpit window while approaching the runway. Guyana is in the northeastern corner of South America.
And perhaps Guyana at the time was too eager, or just too under-resourced, to do a proper background check on Jim Jones. If the country had investigated, they would have found plenty of unflattering press about fake healings, corporal punishment, Jones having sex with members and the liquidation of personal assets into the Peoples Temple’s coffers.
“It cast a dark shadow across the whole of Guyuna,” said Fitz Duke, a local who was 31 years old at the time of the tragedy. He helped the Jonestown pioneers survey the soil before they leased the land, and as a member of the local military that happened to be guarding another plane in Port Kaituma at the time, he witnessed Congressman Ryan and others get shot on the airstrip. He also remembers having a favorable impression of Peoples Temple members prior to the mass murder-suicide.
Like others in Guyana, Duke is not in favor of opening Jonestown to visitors. “I think we should let the whole thing die,” he said, and drew a parallel to Germans “turning the page” on their Nazi past.
Fitz Duke was 31 when the Jonestown tragedy took place. He witnessed the massacre at the airstrip.
A dog naps next to a shop in Port Kaituma.
The counterargument is that Jonestown is also an opportunity to teach the warning signs of cults and put history into context. “If we scoff at another’s experience and categorically deny it could ever happen to us, we will have learned nothing,” wrote Deborah Layton, who left Jonestown soon before the tragedy in 1978. “It is only by knowing the warning signs that we can protect ourselves, our loved ones and our children.”
“I believe Guyana has a responsibility to never let us forget what happened,” said Captain Gerry Gouveia, a former Guyanese Army pilot who was one of the first to rescue Jackie Speier and other survivors the morning after the tragedy. “I don’t call it ‘dark tourism,’” he said. “It’s part of human history.”
We sipped local rum and cola by the pool at one of the Georgetown hotels he now owns, as Gouveia recounted the bloody details of what he experienced. He also believes Guyana could have prevented the bloodshed if it had investigated abuse claims or stopped the guns being shipped there.
Capt. Gerry Gouveia is a former Guyanese Army pilot who helped rescue survivors.
An official statement by Guyana soon after the Jonestown tragedy tried to deflect such blame. “Guyana’s involvement was not much greater than if a Hollywood movie team had come here to shoot a picture,” recounts Jeff Guinn in his book, “The Road to Jonestown.” “The actors were American, the plot was American, Guyana was the stage, and the world was the audience.”
And it’s Americans now who can help bring much needed tourism dollars to local hotels, restaurants and tour guides, in an effort to better understand what Jonestown was all about. “Something good will come of it in terms of revenue from tourism and education,” Adams said. “Maybe they’ll come to Port Kaituma and make a movie!”
Rocks in memory of those who lost their lives at Jonestown are placed at the site of the memorial.
How could Jonestown have happened?
To learn about Jones and how he built his congregation with a combination of charisma, idealism, political instinct, chicanery and fear, is to better understand how the mass murder-suicide occurred.
“Good, smart idealistic people got caught up in the machinations of Jim Jones,” Deborah Layton wrote in her book. “None of his followers were crazy, mindless automatons.”
There have been numerous books and documentaries about Jonestown that cover a lot of the same ground. To read Julia Scheeres’ “A Thousand Lives,” Layton’s first-person account, and Jeff Guinn’s Jim Jones origin (and ending) story, is to enroll in a masterclass on cult-building. Scheeres’ book takes us into the Peoples Temple and Jonestown through the eyes of individual members, explaining why the church was so appealing to them.
Reverend Jim Jones (in red shirt) leads followers and Mr. Muggs, a chimpanzee who lived at Jonestown and was shot on the day of the mass murder-suicide. (The Jonestown Institute)
Layton’s book is such a clear-headed and logical account of her ascension into Jones’ inner circle — which afforded her a level of independence that made possible her escape just months before the tragedy — that a willingness to die for Jones’ nefarious purposes seems almost reasonable. “We were blinded by fear and isolation, physically weak from malnutrition and lack of sleep and mentally exhausted from constant fear of punishment,” Layton writes.
It was Layton’s post-defection accounts to the press that inspired Congressman Ryan to investigate Jonestown in person. And it was her brother Larry who was assigned to be the fake defector and kill Ryan. At the airstrip Larry survived, but served 18 years for his participation in the tragedy.
Peoples Temple follower Larry Layton stands with police following his arrest in November 1978 for his role in conspiring to murder Congressman Ryan. (David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)
Jones was not simply evil. The Peoples Temple story is much more complicated. The early church did tangible good for the communities it served in Indiana and California. It successfully fought segregated businesses, and helped people (not just its members) get jobs, access to health care and beat drug addiction. Some members were attracted to Jones’ method of preaching, learned from the pews of Black churches in his youth. But even members who didn’t care for Jones’ ways could be deeply motivated by all the good they were collectively building.
Even Jonestown provided medical and dental services to locals, as well as jobs for some of them, and built a nearly sustainable farm out of inhospitable former jungle. “It was a beautiful, organized civilization and they seemed very happy,” said Captain Gouveia, who flew Jim Jones into Port Kaituma on numerous occasions. “He was a nice man. I never figured he was a devil.”
The challenge for tour guides now is to help visitors understand the part of human nature that makes suicidal cults possible. Persaud cut a compilation of recorded Jones sermons, edited to take listeners from early loving messages to his descent into anger and evil over the years. Listening to Jones’ final instructions on November 18, 1978, your heart sinks as he insists parents help their kids drink the deadly cocktail before doing so themselves.
Before relocating to Guyana, Jim Jones led the Peoples Temple in San Francisco. (AP)
Bodies lie behind a tub of the punch laced with cyanide in 1978. (Frank Johnston/AP)
Jones’ last words recorded that day were, “We committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” The tape then cuts out.
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” was stenciled on a sign hung above Jim Jones’ chair in the pavilion. It’s a variation on a quote attributed to the philosopher George Santayana. It’s also arguably a mission statement on the value of dark tourism.
Back at the Port Kaituma airport, after our visit to Jonestown, we waited for our plane, delayed by another storm. Persaud walked CNN photographer Will Lanzoni and me out to the spot on the strip where Congressman Ryan, photographer Robinson, cameraman Brown, correspondent Harris, and Parks, the defector, were all killed and others badly wounded.
It was a quiet morning. No howler monkeys to see us off. There was a light rain. And you could hear choir music, clear and sweet, playing from one of the homes lining the runway. It was a Sunday. Time for church. Time to pray. Reflect.
A plane takes off from the Port Kaituma airstrip.
