The arrival of the Americans puzzled Fitz Duke. It was early 1974, and the tiny town of Port Kaituma, deep in the jungle of northern Guyana, was unaccustomed to foreigners beyond the usual miners, and merchants from neighboring Venezuela.

Duke, 22 at the time, watched with curiosity as the Americans docked their river boat in the sleepy settlement, disembarking, he would later learn, after a 24-hour journey from the capital, Georgetown.

The six young men surprised him further with their request: could he help them machete their way through the undergrowth and select a site for a new community? It would be an agricultural cooperative, the idealistic Americans told him, named after their charismatic leader, Jim Jones. We’ll call it Jonestown, they said.

Today it is impossible to hear that name without feeling the chill of the horror with which it will be forever associated.

Nine hundred and nine followers died on November 18, 1978, when cult leader Jones ordered them to drink cyanide-laced fruit punch, proclaiming it an act of ‘revolutionary suicide.’ Those who refused to drink the poison were injected with it – 300 children had it pumped in their mouths.

The scene was sparked by the imminent departure of a high-profile politician who had traveled from San Francisco’s Bay Area, from where many of Jones’s followers hailed. They had followed Jones on the promise of a peaceful existence in ‘The Promised Land’, but friends and family back home were concerned, and Congressman Leo Ryan had come to investigate reports of forced labor, torture and imprisonment. Now he was about to return to the States with his findings.

Instead he was met on the tarmac by Jones’s henchmen, who shot and killed Ryan along with three American journalists who accompanied him, and one cult defector. Five cult members killed themselves or were murdered back at headquarters in Georgetown, bringing the total death toll that day to 919. Before 9/11, it was the largest loss of civilian American life in a single day.

Now, almost 50 years later, the Americans are back. This time not as pioneers, however, but as tourists. And their arrival is far from welcome to some of those most intimately impacted by the horror.

Cult leader Jim Jones, photographed on the morning of November 18, 1978. Hours later he and more than 900 of his followers would be dead

Hundreds of people are seen lying dead on the ground after drinking cyanide at Jonestown

Yulanda Williams, 70, one of the very few to escape from Jonestown, told the Daily Mail: ‘It’s very disrespectful. That place should not be turned into a tourist trap.’

Mike Cartmell, 77, who was married to Jones’s daughter Suzanne and who lost his mother, stepfather, sister and adopted brother in the tragedy, said it was ‘improper’ and ‘crass’ for tourists to visit.

But Duke, who watched the believers arrive all those years ago, and still lives in Port Kaituma, disagrees.

‘There’s so much false information about Jonestown,’ the 78-year-old said. ‘Keeping the memory alive might not be too pleasant. But it’s important.’

The tours were launched a year ago by a Guyanese company, Wanderlust Adventures GY.

Christopher Persaud, who leads the visits explained: ‘The idea is to turn a tragedy into a learning experience – not just for people from our country, but for people around the world.

So far around 60 adventurous souls – mainly North Americans, but some Europeans, Australians and South Americans – have paid $780 to climb into a Cessna plane at Georgetown’s small airport and fly the hour north to Port Kaituma. Today, unlike in the 1970s, there is a tarmac airstrip for daily flights. The plane turns around again immediately on landing: tourists spend the night in Port Kaituma and fly back the following morning.

For Persaud, a deeply-researched raconteur and history fanatic, the tour is both poignant and personal.

Persaud’s grandfather, a correspondent for the New York Times and BBC, was visited by Congressman Ryan in Georgetown before the congressman went north: thankfully, he declined the congressman’s urging to accompany him and report on the scene.

Persaud makes a point of holding a minute’s silence before entering the site.

On arriving in Port Kaituma, now home to around 3,000 people, Persaud shows people the town before they are driven the six miles to what is left of Jonestown.

There is not a lot.

Fitz Duke, 78, led the American pioneers into the jungle in 1974 to help them choose a site for their settlement

Christopher Persaud, who leads the visits explained: ‘The idea is to turn a tragedy into a learning experience – not just for people from our country, but for people around the world’

A memorial site for the victims of the Jonestown massacre

Fifty years ago, the 3,800 acres that Jim Jones leased for 25 years from the Guyanese government, at an annual cost of 25 cents per acre, was a hive of activity.

Jones, born in Indiana, was a master manipulator. Admiring as a child Hitler and Stalin, he envied their hold over people and aped it – skillfully blending socialism, spirituality and faked ‘faith healings’ which were popular with Pentecostal evangelists.

He moved his church from Indiana to California, where it grew exponentially, in parallel with the Civil Rights movement, and won influential backers – Rosalynn Carter, Jane Fonda, Angela Davis and San Francisco power broker Willie Brown among them. Brown compared Jones to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

As the years went on, however, Jones, increasingly paranoid and controlling, told his followers at the San Francisco-based Peoples Temple that they were moving to the South American jungle to escape ‘persecution’ in the United States.

He called Jonestown the Promised Land, and indeed his followers made an impressive job of taming the wilderness: 50 acres were cleared, with the help of Amerindians. Dormitories and cabins were constructed, wells dug and electricity installed. Land was tilled to produce cassava, mangos, papaya, rice and cabbage. A basketball court was built, and flowers planted along pathways.

Today the jungle has reclaimed the space. A simple white stone monument was erected in 2009, but beyond that there is scarcely a trace of what was once there.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, the wooden structures rotted, while locals carried off anything salvageable.

These days only a few rusting remains give a hint of what once was: the Daily Mail was shown a Cincinnati-made lathe from the sawmill and a tractor, sinking into the floor of the cacophonous forest. Deeper still lay a flatbed truck, speared by tree trunks and enveloped by vines.

Local man Carl Daniels, 57 – who still owns several books he took from the abandoned Jonestown library – led the way, slashing through the undergrowth with a machete, scaring away snakes and sending clouds of insects buzzing into the trees. He works with Wanderlust when they visit and thinks the tours are important.

Jones, born in Indiana, was a master manipulator, skillfully blending socialism, spirituality and faked ‘faith healings’ which were popular with Pentecostal evangelists

Paper cups filled with cyanide-laced punch, as well as syringes, were found at Jonestown

Jonestown pioneers are seen clearing the jungle in the mid 1970s

‘If it wasn’t for these remains people would have doubts,’ that Jonestown ever existed, he said. ‘But there are things to prove that it was here. The tractors, the truck. That really gives people time to think and imagine what used to go on.’

Daniels himself can still picture the gardens, the grassy lawns. He pointed to an uncharacteristically straight and orderly line of plants: they used to line the walkways, he said.

Back in Port Kaituma, the Daily Mail met Clement Adams sitting on the banks of the Kaituma river, 75 miles inland from the muddy mouth of the Atlantic.

Adams, 58, would visit Jonestown as a 10-year-old boy, he said: he befriended the American children, who gave him his first pair of socks in exchange for bubble gum. They’d listen to the Jonestown band and play with the Americans’ pet chimpanzee, Mr Muggs.

His sister was taken to the settlement to have a tooth removed by the American dentists: the nearest clinic was over 60 miles away.

Adams vividly remembered hearing the gunshots from the airstrip echoing across the river and then seeing the truck with Jones’s goons speeding away from the shootings in Port Kaituma and back to Jonestown.

He heard rumors that those living in Jonestown were dead, and so two or three days later he went out to the settlement and saw the hundreds of bodies lying on the ground.

‘Poor people in Guyana, they can’t afford a line to clip the clothes, so they just spread it to the grass to dry,’ he said. ‘That’s what it looked like to me. I thought it was just clothes. But it was bodies.’

Clement Adams, 58, went out to the settlement and saw the hundreds of bodies lying on the ground. He initially thought it was washed clothes, lying out to dry

Congressman Leo Ryan, in the red shirt, arriving at Port Kaituma

Duke’s memories were equally traumatic.

He, along with many in the town, walked to the airstrip to wave goodbye to the famous American politician.

Four years after leading the Peoples Temple ‘pioneers’ into the woods, he sensed something was afoot – but had no idea of the horrors about to unfold.

‘The group gathered by the plane, and then a tractor and trailer arrived. It had gunmen in the back, hiding,’ he said. ‘They came with a specific mission, in my opinion: to get rid of Congressman Ryan. You must not return to America and divulge new information.

‘When the shooting started, it was chaos – we were running, scattering. I saw Miss Parks [Peoples Temple defector Patricia Parks, 44] fall to the ground after being shot in the head. I remember seeing your ambassador, I can’t remember his name, he was shot in his posterior, the US ambassador [Richard Dwyer, the deputy chief of mission of the US embassy].

‘He was begging for somebody to give him a weapon. But nobody had a weapon, because nobody expected that.’

Duke was initially opposed to bringing visitors back to Jonestown, believing it reopened old wounds.

But now, like Clement Adams, he sees the sense in it. Both men point out that most Guyanese children have never heard of Jonestown. Wanderlust takes local people to the site for a steeply discounted price.

‘Mr Jones claimed to be a preacher, a man of God,’ said Duke. ‘And then to have a thing like this happen… I think it leaves a big stain on our country and our community. We should learn to scrutinize these people more thoroughly.’

In California, however, the survivors have mixed feelings.

Ryan minutes before Jones’s followers arrived at the Port Kaituma airstrip and opened fire, killing him and four others

Hue Fortson Jr, 74, lost his wife and three-year-old son in the tragedy. He had left Jonestown two months earlier after Jones asked him to return to San Francisco, to run the Peoples Temple there.

He thinks anyone wanting to learn about the tragedy should make the journey.

‘I would encourage someone to go, if they really want to know,’ he said. ‘I would welcome that, myself. And make sure you look at that site, and then think about your life, and how you’re being led, what you believe in.

‘The negative spirit that was operating in Jones himself is still in the land today, because spirits don’t die, they just find another host. We’ve seen other organizations rising up that way, trying to duplicate what he did. It’s all about control, controlling other people’s minds, and taking away their rights as human beings.’

Others dislike the idea of money being made from the tragedy – although in reality, Wanderlust’s margins on this tour are wafer-thin – and are concerned about their relatives being ridiculed for putting their trust in Jones.

More than three quarters of the Peoples Temple members were black and believed in Jones’s early preachings about racial equality and community support.

Yet as the decades rolled on – he founded Peoples Temple in his native Indiana in the 1950s – he became more unhinged, violent and messianic.

The phrase ‘to drink the Kool Aid’ – shorthand for being duped – comes from Jonestown, but in fact it’s just one more myth about the place: the 909 who died in Jonestown actually drank cyanide-infused Flavor Aid, a cheaper version of the drink.

For Yulanda Williams, who left Guyana in 1977, it remains ‘sacred ground.’

She gained her freedom by convincing Jones that allowing her to leave would prove there was no enslavement. She later joined the San Francisco police department and spent 32 years in the force.

There’s no denying ‘dark tourism’, as it’s known, is big business. Tourists are eager to explore North Korea, get close to the frontline in Ukraine, and see Syria’s death camps. Global Industry Analysts, a market research firm, estimates that the dark-tourism market is worth $35 billion annually, and will grow to $41 billion by 2030.

Persaud and the Port Kaituma locals point out that the tourists spend money in largely-forgotten corners of the country, supporting small businesses. None of his guests have been simply passing through Guyana, he notes: all have come specifically for the Jonestown Memorial Tour.

In November 2028 it will be 50 years since the tragedy. Both Cartmell and Williams would like there to be more done to tell the survivors’ stories.

Williams said she would be open to tourists visiting the site, if survivors like her accompanied them. And she thinks San Francisco should do more to honor those who died.

Yulanda Williams, second right, is seen with fellow Peoples Temple survivors

Mike Cartmell, who was married to Jones’s daughter Suzanne and who lost his mother, stepfather, sister and adopted brother in the tragedy, said it was ‘improper’ and ‘crass’ for tourists to visit

Cartmell feels more conflicted when it comes to turning the sites of atrocities – West African slave forts, Auschwitz, the Killing Fields of Cambodia – into tourist destinations. Is it necessary for lessons to be learned?

‘That’s a very good question,’ he said. ‘I think the difference is that I didn’t experience those places personally, although I have many questions.

‘With Jonestown, I helped plan it. I was Jones’s second in command. And my family all died down there, so it’s a little bit different.’

For Duke, the arrival of the Americans all those years ago was ‘more than surprising… more than shocking.’

Why, he asked, would anyone leave a developed nation and ‘come to the heart of the jungle’?

‘Personally, if I had known, I would not have got involved. But you had no way of even imagining what would happen. Absolutely no idea of the horror.’

Our tour over, the plane picks up speed and takes off from Port Kaituma.

Duke, Adams and Daniels are left behind along with the spirits of those who perished.

Beneath us, for almost the entire flight back to Georgetown, there is nothing but thick forest.

SOURCE: https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15877075/Jonestown-site-mass-suicide-jim-jones.html