Deep in the Guyanese jungle, only a signpost and a nondescript plaque serve as reminders of a cult settlement where one of the most spine-chilling mass murder-suicides in modern history took place almost five decades ago.
“Welcome to the People’s Temple,” reads the green lettering on a sign above a red dirt road announcing the entrance to what was once Jonestown, a jungle utopia-turned-nightmare, where 914 adults and children died on November 18, 1978.
They were the followers of the US reverend-guru Jim Jones, who coerced them into committing suicide, urging parents to give their children poison, while others were shot trying to flee or forced to drink the deadly liquid.
Photo: AFP
The carnage highlighted the manipulative power cult leaders wield over their followers, and those who live nearby are torn between wanting to move on and wishing the site could serve as a lesson as to what went wrong.
“There is really nothing to see, unless the place is cleared up, and you will see what remains on the ground in terms of old vehicles, tractors and other things,” said Fitz Duke, who lives in the remote nearby village of Port Kaituma.
He was 31 when the massacre occurred, and he recalls the presence of Jones and his following of poor African Americans, who worked hard to clear the jungle as they built what was meant to be a socialist, self-sufficient settlement on about 1,500 hectares in the middle of nowhere.
Photo: AFP
“They had a very good agricultural system,” Duke said, adding that local villagers often worked for the community.
“They had a lot of livestock. They were almost self-sufficient in terms of food for themselves. We used to visit often. They had a very good band, a lot of instruments,” he added.
However, while the community was billed as a non-racist, non-sexist, paradise on earth, it was run with an iron fist by Jones and his aides.
Photo: AFP
Ex-cult members made claims of drugs use, hunger and sexual enslavement, saying Jones forced his followers to work from dawn to dusk, six days a week.
“You couldn’t just come and go as you like,” said Duke. “They had a huge tower to see directly on the main road. And they always had men up there to watch with their binoculars.”
He said Jonestown guards with “bigger guns than the police” used to search the cars, and once stopped a police car, telling them “it wasn’t Guyana, it was Jonestown.”
HUNDREDS ‘BRAINWASHED’
After complaints in the US about the living conditions in the community, Congressman Leo Ryan visited Jonestown on Nov. 17, 1978, to investigate. A day later, as he prepared to board a plane home, Ryan was shot dead on the tarmac by Jones’s men, who also killed three journalists and a cult member who wanted to leave.
For Jones — who had long warned his followers of a looming assault by the US government and carried out sessions in which they and their children drank fake poison — there was no turning back.
He told his followers that Ryan was a CIA agent and that US Marines were preparing to attack the community.
A 45-minute recording found near his body would later reveal how he incited his followers to commit suicide in what he said was a “revolutionary act.”
“It’s still a wonder why and how one man could have so many hundreds of people brainwashed like that,” said Duke.
Forty-four years later, only a white slab in the overgrowth bearing the words “in memory of the victims of the Jonestown massacre” bears testament to what happened at the site.
The signpost at the entrance to the community was put up to replace the old version sometime after the events.
‘A BAD MEMORY’
Duke is among those who would prefer the massacre be forgotten.
“I feel that it has done our country real, real bad. It put Guyana on the map for bad reasons. They should do away with it. They should give the land to farmers for them to cultivate it,” he said.
Local authorities did not wish to speak on the massacre. However, opposition official in Port Kaituma, Tiffnie Daniels, 31, said she would like to see the site become a place where visitors could “understand what happened.”
“There is just a monument and the jungle. But, if children want to study that, or people want to visit as a tourist site, there is nothing,” she added.
“Yes, it’s a bad memory, but it’s also history.”
The breakwater stretches out to sea from the sprawling Kaohsiung port in southern Taiwan. Normally, it’s crowded with massive tankers ferrying liquefied natural gas from Qatar to be stored in the bulbous white tanks that dot the shoreline. These are not normal times, though, and not a single shipment from Qatar has docked at the Yongan terminal since early March after the Strait of Hormuz was shuttered. The suspension has provided a realistic preview of a potential Chinese blockade, a move that would throttle an economy anchored by the world’s most advanced and power-hungry semiconductor industry. It is a stark reminder of
May 11 to May 17 Traversing the southern slopes of the Yushan Range in 1931, Japanese naturalist Tadao Kano knew he was approaching the last swath of Taiwan still beyond colonial control. The “vast, unknown territory,” protected by the “fierce” Bunun headman Dahu Ali, was “filled with an utterly endless jungle that choked the mountains and valleys,” Kano wrote. He noted how the group had “refused to submit to the measures of our authorities and entrenched themselves deep in these mountains … living a free existence spent chasing deer in the morning and seeking serow in the evening,” even describing them as
The last couple of weeks spectators in Taiwan and abroad have been treated to a remarkable display of infighting in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) over the supplementary defense budget. The party has split into two camps, one supporting an NT$800 billion special defense budget and one supporting an NT$380 billion budget with additional funding contingent on receiving letters of acceptance (LOA) from the US. Recent media reports have said that the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) is leaning toward the latter position. President William Lai (賴清德) has proposed NT$1.25 trillion for purchases of US arms and for development of domestic weapons
As a different column was being written, the big news dropped that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) announced that negotiations within his caucus, with legislative speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT, party Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chair Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) had produced a compromise special military budget proposal. On Thursday morning, prior to meeting with Cheng over a lunch of beef noodles, Lu reiterated her support for a budget of NT$800 or NT$900 billion — but refused to comment after the meeting. Right after Fu’s
RSS