In what was described as an unprecedented mass suicide, over 900 persons died as a result of poisoning or of gunshot wounds on Nov.18, 1978, at the Jonestown agricultural commune of the (US) People's Temple sect, some 150 miles northwest of Georgetown (the capital of Guyana).
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During the previous night Mr Leo J. Ryan (53), a US Democratic congressman from San Francisco, and four other US citizens (three journalists and a woman) were shot dead at an airstrip at Port Kaituma (about eight miles from Jonestown), while nine other persons were wounded-among them Mr Richard Dwyer, the second most senior official at the US embassy in Georgetown.
Mr Ryan had visited Jonestown to investigate the sect after he had received complaints from some of his constituents alleging that members of their families were being kept at the commune against their will; he was shot as he was about to board an aircraft together with several persons who had decided to leave the sect.
The People's Temple sect had been founded by Mr James Warren (Jim) Jones (46), who had obtained a strong following, mainly from impoverished Blacks in San Francisco. Mr Jones had supported the 1968 and 1972 election campaigns of President Nixon and later those of leading Democrats, and in 1976 he was appointed chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Two years earlier, however, he had established the "Jonestown" commune for members of the sect on 27,000 acres of land set aside by the Government of Guyana, and had subsequently settled there himself. According to a document published by the Government of Guyana on Nov. 20, he had submitted to it letters from prominent Americans, including Mrs Rosalvnn Carter (wife of Mr Jimmy Carter, then Governor of Georgia) and Senator (later Vice-President) Walter Mondale, when he sought that Government's approval for the setting up of his commune. (As a religious body the sect was allowed to import goods without customs control by the Guyanese authorities.) From 1977 onwards, however, reports appeared in part of the San Francisco press alleging that life in the commune involved slave-like working conditions, beatings and death threats.
Following the shooting at Port Kaituma airstrip, Guyanese troops were flown to the area on Nov.19 and reported on the following day that they had found the dead bodies of Mr Jones and of hundreds of his followers, most of them apparently poisoned and some of them shot dead.
The troops also picked up a number of US citizens who had fled into the jungle when the killings had started, both at the airstrip and in the commune, among them Mr Mark Lane, a US lawyer who represented the sect (and had earlier been associated with controversies over the killing of President Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King).
As all the members of the commune had been US citizens, US troops began to arrive on Nov.21 to recover their bodies. It was then revealed that, after hearing that Mr Ryan had been killed but that some members of his party had survived, Mr Jones had ordered his followers to commit the mass suicide which he had rehearsed with them several times (when he had warned them that they were about to be attacked by mercenaries of the Central Intelligence Agency).
According to several surviving eyewitnesses, the commune's medical officer (Dr Lawrence Schacht) had set up a large tub filled with an artifical fruit drink to which cyanide had been added from nine containers stockpiled for this purpose, and Mr Jones had ordered his followers, both children and adults, to drink the mixture, while babies were forcibly made to swallow it and persons who refused to take it were forced to do so by armed guards or were given injections of cyanide into the upper arm. Death had resulted within about five minutes. .
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