The Road to Jonestown

by Jeff Guinn

  The Guyanese saw another potential benefit in Peoples Temple establishing its mission deep in the jungle. Every substantial Guyanese town was located on the Atlantic coastline—and the coast was eroding. The capital city and every other Guyanese town was barricaded by jungle. The government had used its limited resources to establish inland communities, but none lasted long. The jungle was a hard place. The people on the coast had no interest in relocating there. In desperation, the government had hacked out a National Service settlement in the North West District, close to Matthews Ridge and about thirty miles from where it hoped the American church would build its mission. The National Service was Burnham’s brainchild. Teenage boys were recruited and trained for military duty. Because many young Guyanese lived in abject poverty, the boys signed up less out of patriotic zeal than for guaranteed meals and a covered place to sleep. There were about 1,100 National Service cadets at the North West District camp, not enough to give pause to the Venezuelan army, or to inspire other Guyanese to join them as jungle dwellers. But perhaps these American church people could do both.

  On December 21, the Americans were flown 190 miles over the jungle to Matthews Ridge, a mining town in the North West District. Matthews Ridge had a rail line that ran another thirty-five miles, close to the much smaller village of Port Kaituma, which had a small airstrip and also a dock—the Kaituma River connected the town to the Atlantic Ocean, so it was possible to sail there along the coast from Georgetown. But that took a full day; flying was a matter of hours, and the Guyanese wanted their American friends—hopefully, soon their neighbors—to see the proposed mission site immediately.

  What they saw seemed ideal to Jones. While Port Kaituma itself wasn’t much—it existed as a shipping port for the Matthews Ridge manganese mines, which were currently shut down, and consisted mostly of four or five dozen battered huts and a few bars—its dock and airstrip offered access. The suggested mission site was several miles removed from the town. There was a small, partial clearing left from previous attempts to establish a settlement, barely a few square yards, but enough to convince Jones that clearing the jungle would be difficult but not impossible. There was considerable concern on the part of Guyanese officials, who feared the isolation of the site might put off their American visitors, but the isolation was exactly what Jones wanted. He announced on the spot that this was it: Peoples Temple would build its mission here in the North West District. On the way back to the capital, someone asked what the new settlement would be named. There was some discussion, but the choice was obvious: Jonestown.

  Back in Georgetown, there were business details to work out. Peoples Temple asked to lease 25,000 acres; Guyanese officials thought that was too much. They reached an agreement for an initial lease of 3,000 acres, with an option for the Temple to expand its holdings if the settlement was successful. The lease was for five years; an extension could be negotiated after that if both parties were agreeable. The Temple’s annual rent would be 25 cents per acre, with that price reviewed and, if appropriate, adjusted in five-year increments. The Temple promised to invest a minimum of $400,000 in building and maintaining the mission during the first two years of the project. During the first five years, Temple members would be required to cultivate and occupy at least half of the leased land. These official negotiations took time, and weren’t concluded until 1977.

  But lease details were less important to the Guyanese than getting Americans into the North West District, and Jones was anxious for work on the Promised Land settlement to begin at once. So in March 1974, Jones dispatched a half dozen followers to Guyana, where they began surveying the mission site. Within a few months, another few dozen Temple members would join them, and the clearing and building, led by Jones loyalist Charlie Touchette and his son Mike, would begin. Jones hoped to send the first settlers by August. The Guyanese promised to assist with temporary housing for the workers, and friendly Amerindians were recruited as guides. The Temple bought a boat named the Cudjoe to bring members back and forth from Georgetown, and also to make supply runs between Port Kaituma and Miami. The arrangements were flawless, except in one regard: they’d underestimated the jungle.

  The Guyanese jungle is triple canopy—as one flies over it, its towering trees resemble sprawling, tightly massed stalks of broccoli with claustrophic square miles of unbroken, impenetrable dark green bisected not by roads but a few meandering, muddy rivers. On the ground, the trees’ thick trunks stand together like barely separated slats in a giant picket fence, and winding between the trees is underbrush bristling with thorns. Sunlight barely penetrates, but rain does, particularly during the wet seasons, dripping down through the layers of the tree leaves and limbs, turning the jungle’s dirt floor to mud. The air is thick with humidity and the stink of rotting vegetation. Birds and animals abound, often unseen in the gloom, though their rustling is constant. There is a cacophony of coos and caws from the birds and yelps from monkeys. There is also the constant buzzing of insects, many of which bite or sting. The ground is frequently crisscrossed by marching columns of ants, some as large as thumb joints. Everywhere in the brush are snakes, many poisonous, some instantly lethal. Lurking, but seldom seen, are jungle cats.

  The overall effect is simultaneously ominous and awe-inspiring, nature at its most primitive—and lovely. In clearings, and where there are gaps in the trees, bright bird plumage flashes in contrast with often azure sky. But the first small wave of Temple workers—dubbed “the Pioneers” by their church—were there to build, not sightsee. At least initially, they were frustrated rather than impressed by the jungle. Even with the Amerindian guides helping them thread their way several miles from Port Kaituma to the Jonestown mission site, the newcomers were in constant danger of getting lost: Mike Touchette told playwright and author Leigh Fondakowski, “When you walk through that jungle, you could turn 360 degrees and have no clue where you’re at.” But the Pioneers had to master the jungle, and quickly, because the first full-time settlers were expected soon.

  The first challenge was clearing acreage. The Pioneers expected to fell the mighty trees with chainsaws, but when they tried, the chainsaw blades shattered—the wood was harder than the metal. If the trees couldn’t be cleared, then nothing else could be done. The Amerindians came to the rescue, demonstrating how to rig a pulley system with ropes tied to several trees, and then one tree at a time could be leveraged out of the ground. It was backbreaking work, and very slow. The Americans hired more natives; Amerindian labor was the basis for initial Temple progress in the jungle. After some space was cleared and a narrow path from Port Kaituma to Jonestown was cut, heavy equipment could finally be brought in, all of it initially rented from the Guyanese government, then gradually supplemented and eventually replaced by machinery purchased in the United States by the Temple and shipped to Guyana. Because conditions in the jungle were so brutal, the equipment kept breaking down. Replacement parts were costly. There were months, even weeks, when repair bills totaled thousands of dollars. Often parts had to be ordered while broken-down machines stood idle.

  But the Pioneers were never idle. Even when they weren’t working in the jungle, they were kept busy in the huts they rented in Port Kaituma. Jones demanded detailed records of all daily expenditures, from $963.00 for metal rods and buckets to $6.50 for tea bags and cheese. The Pioneers also suffered ailments they expected—sunburn, bug bites, pulled muscles, cuts from tools—and some they hadn’t, especially damage to their feet. Worm larvae permeated the jungle soil, and the pests thrived upon transfer to human flesh. Foot fungus and other skin ulcers were also constant problems. The heat was prostrating even on the coolest days, and the jungle humidity compounded the effect. Sometimes the Pioneers generated additional heat, lighting deliberate “burns” to rid partially cleared land of tree roots and ground growth. The workers lost pounds each day in sweat.

  Yet the Pioneers persevered. They believed in the work they were doing. The Jonestown mission would further contribute to the great socialis
t example Peoples Temple set for the world. Once they had sufficient land cleared to begin farming, they were certain that fertile jungle soil, properly maintained, would bear immense amounts of produce, enough to feed four hundred or five hundred Jonestown settlers with sufficient excess to load on the Temple boat and distribute to hungry communities along the South American coast.

  Back in America, Jones promised that and much more. After returning from Guyana, he first teased followers by announcing, “In the next few days we’re going to get some land south of the equator.” (Guyana is slightly north of the equator.) Soon afterward, he revealed that the property—the Promised Land—was in Guyana, a country he described as a wondrous tropical paradise. He was certain everyone would want to move there, but before any relocation was possible, Jonestown still had to be built, and that would cost money. Members had previously been dunned for excess personal possessions. Now Jones demanded that all those with life insurance policies cash them in and turn the money over for use in the Jonestown project. At every service, members were expected to hand Jones “commitment envelopes” with a minimum 25 percent of their weekly earnings—and they had to write their salaries on the outside of the envelope, so it could be verified that they were contributing the appropriate amount. The massive Temple mailing list was utilized, too—the church printing operation turned out a snappy “Operation Breadbasket” pamphlet and copies were sent to hundreds of thousands of supporters. After being informed of the Temple’s new overseas agricultural mission intended to feed “hungry people of the world,” recipients were urged to donate suggested amounts for specific uses, anywhere from $2 for a drill bit to $5,000 for a secondhand generator. Every cent, Jones emphasized in his sermons and in print, helped make the difference between Jonestown lasting or failing.

  In retrospect, it all happened very fast, the wearying struggles of the Pioneers notwithstanding. Jones first broached the Promised Land in the spring of 1973, visited Guyana that December, had tentative lease agreements in place and work crews onsite by March. From the Temple perspective, the whole process took only about a year.

  It seemed even faster to the Guyanese. They were approached by the Temple in late 1973, and loaned heavy equipment to the first wave of workers the following March. More than forty years later, former official Christopher “Kit” Nascimento admitted that he, Prime Minister Burnham, and other national officials were “too quick to close the deal. But we felt it would be a matter of using America for our national purposes, as opposed to what Americans always wanted to do, use other countries for theirs. Frustrate Venezuela—wonderful. Jones and his people fit our government’s plans to populate the interior. It’s obvious now that we didn’t do due diligence on Jonestown, on Jones and his followers. We just didn’t, because they seemed such a perfect fit.”

  That was a relief to Jones. There was a recent incident that he especially did not want the Guyanese to know about.

  * * *

  Jim Jones had been satisfying his sexual urges with different partners from among Temple membership, most often women and occasionally men serving on the Planning Committee. Occasionally, he took lovers from the general membership, at least once committing statutory rape with a girl in her early teens. When pregnancies resulted, Jones expected the women to get abortions. Grace Stoen had been the exception.

  In December 1973, Jones had reason to feel especially triumphant. The Examiner’s investigative series was not only quashed, but apparently forgotten. San Francisco’s political leaders were highly complimentary of Peoples Temple’s good works. The danger posed by the Gang of Eight’s defection had been avoided. The students’ families still in the Temple remained loyal. The Gang’s departing criticism of Temple leadership’s racial makeup and Jones’s sex life had come to nothing. Jones himself was about to leave for Guyana, where he was certain he would begin the process of successfully establishing a Peoples Temple agricultural mission. Godlike or simply a superior human, Jim Jones was on a roll. At such moments, he habitually overstepped, and now was no exception.

  Los Angeles police had received numerous complaints about gay men soliciting prospective partners in MacArthur Park, and especially in the nearby Westlake movie theater. Both were about a mile and a half from the Peoples Temple church in the city. Vice squad officers began plainclothes stakeouts in the park and theater. At the Westlake, they took seats in empty sections of the balcony, or else loitered in the men’s room, and waited to be approached.

  On the afternoon of December 13, an officer sitting in the balcony watching Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry saw a man motioning for him to come over. The officer left the balcony and went into the nearest bathroom. The other man followed him. When the man began masturbating in front of the policeman he was arrested and taken to Ramparts police station, and there James Warren Jones was charged with lewd conduct. On the way to the station, Jones identified himself as a minister, apparently hoping to be set free, but to no avail. On station paperwork, Jones identified his employer as “Disciples of Christ,” not “Peoples Temple.” His bond was set at $500. Jones promptly made bail and found a doctor who provided a possible medical explanation for his action in the men’s room: Jones had an enlarged prostate, and had been advised to run or jump in place to ease discomfort. He’d been doing that, not masturbating. It was all a misunderstanding.

  One week later, a municipal court judge agreed to dismiss the charge, but only if Jones first signed a “stipulation [for] probable cause,” meaning the arrest had been appropriate. That got Jones off the legal hook but left him otherwise dangling. There was now a public record of what he’d done, prime material for investigative journalists or representatives from a foreign government doing a comprehensive background check. Tim Stoen was called in to help; he was initially informed that only minors could have their arrest and court records sealed. Stoen kept trying, and in February 1974 the same municipal court judge who originally ruled on the case ordered that Jones’s records regarding the incident be destroyed. It seemed that Jones was in the clear, but the arresting officer was so incensed that he filed an internal complaint about the judge’s action. A drawn-out process ensued; the judge was eventually asked to reconsider but refused.

  Jones wasn’t certain if his arrest remained on public record or not. Other matters demanded his immediate attention, foremost among them the details involved in building Jonestown. He prepared an explanation if arrest details ever emerged. The LAPD had been out to get him since the ambulance-related riot outside the Los Angeles temple back in January. He’d stood up to them then, and this setup, the false charge and arrest, was their revenge. Jones maintained his complete innocence—and, certainly, everyone knew of the LAPD’s well-deserved reputation for framing its enemies. If nothing else, that story would likely resonate with the Temple’s black members who hailed from Los Angeles. No one understood better than they did about LAPD corruption. Whether it would work as well on Guyanese investigators was another matter, but Jones never had to find out. Guyana’s prime minister and his advisors wanted an agreement in place just as quickly as he did, and early construction work on Jonestown continued.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  KIMO

  Following his arrest, Jones began emphasizing a theme in his sermons and in Planning Commission meetings: everyone is homosexual. He’d occasionally made the statement before, but now it became constant. Those engaging in heterosexual intercourse were compensating for their real carnal desires. Anyone Jones wanted to take down a peg was required to stand and admit his or her homosexuality. Those who initially refused were browbeaten until they complied. Stephan Jones thought that his father “was just trying to feel okay about himself . . . for him to deal with [his bisexuality], every other guy had to have the same sexual feelings.”

  Tim Stoen was the exception who refused to confess when confronted by Jones, telling him, “No, Jim, I am not [homosexual].” Jones couldn’t afford an open clash with his attorney, so he said, “Well, we’ll let Tim think a
bout it,” and Stoen did. He concluded that “when the opportunity presented itself, I would move elsewhere and exit anonymously.” For the time being, he stayed, both out of continued belief in the Temple’s goals and programs, and his attachment to young John Victor Stoen. For the first two years of the child’s life, he lived with Tim and Grace Stoen. After the little boy’s second birthday, he was raised communally in Redwood Valley, living with Temple member Barbara Cordell—she had custody of several youngsters. The Stoens saw John Victor, often called John-John, every day. The Temple’s purpose in raising children communally was to instill in them the essence of socialism, with everyone brought up under equal circumstances.

  Potential fallout from the arrest wasn’t Jones’s only pressing concern. Months earlier, the Geary Boulevard temple in San Francisco had burned. Terri Buford believes that the fire was deliberately set, reinforcing members’ belief that outside enemies continually plotted their destruction. “Just before the fire, Jack Beam came up to all of us working [at Geary Boulevard] and said we had to leave for Redwood Valley immediately for an important meeting there,” she says. “All of us went, except for Jack Beam. That night the Temple burned, and Jim made it sound like it was arson. From then on, security was tighter and everyone coming in was searched.” The actual incineration didn’t cause Jones distress. What upset him was discovering that insurance wouldn’t pay for rebuilding the temple—church administrator Tish Leroy had forgotten to make monthly payments. That meant hundreds of thousands in unexpected costs. To defray reconstruction expenses, Jones asked all able-bodied members to come in on weeknights and weekends to help with construction. But it took months, and meanwhile San Francisco meetings had to be held again at nearby Benjamin Franklin Junior High.