The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

It’s hard to recognize the old Jonestown site now. Once again, it bristles with thick, barbed brush. Within months of the tragedy, Amerindians had carried off almost every useful scrap of material for their own dwellings. In the decades since, the jungle has reasserted itself. All that’s left are some bits of the cassava mill; a mounted, rudimentary map of what the settlement looked like; a small white monument honoring the Jonestown dead; and several metal skeletons of trucks and tractors, all of them impaled by the trunks of towering trees that have split apart the vehicles’ rusted metal ribs. The road into Jonestown has become overgrown, too, and vehicles can’t complete the six-mile trip from Port Kaituma. Those determined to reach the site have to cut the last part of their way in with machetes. Just as demagogues lead their well-intentioned followers into tragedy, so the jungle inevitably reclaims its own.