May 24, 1997, Seattle Times - Chicago Tribune, Jonestown Fades Into Jungle And History Books, by Laurie Goering,

JONESTOWN, Guyana - The remains of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple rest deep in the Guyanese jungle, a 5-mile drive from the muddy Indian river town of Port Kaituma, where jaguar skins dry on the front porches of thatched huts.

Now part of a 4 million-acre timber concession, the site where more than 900 people died in 1978 in the worst mass cult suicide and murder in modern history is little more than a clearing in the forest, slashed in half by a new red-earth logging road.

The corrugated-roof pavilion itself, where the vat of cyanide-laced grape punch sat, has long since been torn down, scavenged for its wood and iron. Where it stood lies a tangle of thorny brush that hides, locals say, Jones' throne chair and the colony's rotting piano.

"This kind of thing keeps happening," said Gerald Gouveia, a former Guyanese soldier and private pilot who flew Jones back and forth from his isolated colony. He hopes to preserve Jonestown as a tourist attraction.

"We need to keep Jonestown alive as an example," he said.

In late March, 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult in California killed themselves, intent on shedding their earthly bodies and catching a ride on a spaceship their leader believed was trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.

As similar apocalyptic cults prepare for the end of the millennium, cult researchers say such scenes will be repeated.

On Nov. 18, 1978, 911 followers of Jones, a self-declared messiah in sunglasses, swallowed cyanide in the jungle commune where their "father," as they called Jones, had brought them to live in social and racial harmony.

Told that CIA-directed Guyanese soldiers were advancing on Jonestown to torture, murder and castrate them, the men, women and children of Jonestown followed a late-night drill they had practiced many times before, swallowing glasses of sweet grape drink at Jones' command.

This time the poison was real. A tape recorder, left running at the scene, preserves the unearthly screams of the dying and the cries of those felled by guns and crossbows as they fled for their lives.

Jones, by all accounts a charming and manipulative socialist revolutionary with a growing sense of paranoia, moved his Peoples Temple commune from San Francisco to Guyana in the early 1970s, intent on escaping what he saw as police and media persecution.

The Rev. Andrew Morrison, an aging Jesuit who in the 1970s ran Guyana's only independent newspaper, the Catholic Standard, began suspecting trouble at Jonestown in 1974: Jones requested permission to use the Catholic church for what he said would be an agricultural lecture.

Instead Jones, who considered himself the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, performed fake healings before a packed crowd, producing bloody animal parts on hunks of cotton that he said were cancers pulled from the bodies of sufferers.

Morrison, horrified, began to investigate.

Over the years, Peoples Temple deserters began reporting brutal conditions at Jonestown.

Underfed followers were forced to work long hours in the fields. Spies reported "negative attitudes" to Jones, who beat and humiliated followers who questioned him and sometimes buried them alive.

Escape was nearly impossible, deserters said. Armed guards patrolled the entrances. Jones confiscated followers' passports and money and censored their letters. Guyana's capital, Georgetown, was 140 miles away, through dense forest.

In November 1978, Rep. Leo Ryan, accompanied by reporters and family members of Peoples Temple initiates, arrived in Guyana to investigate allegations of abuses.

Jones ordered them not to visit. Ryan came anyway. After a tour of the compound, he insisted that anyone who wanted to leave should come with him. Twelve people stepped forward.

For Jones, "that was the signal everything was lost," Morrison said. "Jim Jones couldn't stand it."

When Ryan's party left, Jones sent a handful of armed lieutenants after them on a tractor. Five were shot dead, including Ryan. Others raced for the woods or played dead.

That evening, back in Jonestown, Jones called his followers together one last time.