“The large central building was ringed by bright
colors. It looked like a parking lot filled with cars. When the plane
dipped lower, the cars turned out to be bodies. Scores and scores of
bodies —hundreds of bodies—wearing red dresses, blue T shirts, green
blouses, pink slacks, children’s polka-dotted jumpers. Couples with their arms around each other, children holding parents.
Nothing moved. Washing hung on the clotheslines. The fields were freshly plowed. Banana trees and grape vines were
flourishing. But nothing moved.” So reported TIME Correspondent Donald Neff, one of the first newsmen to
fly in last week to the hitherto obscure hamlet of Jonestown in the
jungles of Guyana, on the northern coast of South America. The scene
below him was one of almost unimaginable carnage. In an appalling
demonstration of the way in which a charismatic leader can bend the
minds of his followers with a devilish blend of professed altruism and
psychological tyranny, some 900 members of the California-based Peoples
Temple died in a self-imposed ritual of mass suicide and murder. Not since hundreds of Japanese civilians leaped to their deaths off the
cliffs of Saipan as American forces approached the Pacific island in
World War II had there been a comparable act of collective
self-destruction. The followers of the Rev. Jim Jones, 47, a once
respected Indianaborn humanitarian who degenerated into egomania and
paranoia, had first ambushed a party of visiting Americans, killing
California Congressman Leo Ryan, 53, three newsmen and one defector
from their heavily guarded colony at Jonestown. Then, exhorted by their
leader, intimidated by armed guards and lulled with sedatives and
painkillers, parents and nurses used syringes to squirt a concoction of
potassium cyanide and potassium chloride onto the tongues of babies.
The adults and older children picked up paper cups and sipped the same
deadly poison sweetened by purple Kool-Aid. All week long, a horrified world marveled at new details of the
slaughter and new mysteries about Jones’ cult. While the bodies swelled
and rotted in the tropical sun, two U.S. military cargo planes flew in
to bring back the remains to grieving relatives. At the same time,
helicopters whirred over the jungles to search for survivors who were
thought to be hiding from the cult. There were reports that the colony
had been terrorized by Jones, who was rumored to be dying of cancer.
Police found huge caches of illegal arms, ranging from automatic rifles
to crossbows, but hundreds of thousands of dollars had disappeared from
the colony’s safe. And only at week’s end did officials declare that
there were virtually no survivors in the forest, and that the death
toll was not 409, as first announced, but about 900. Psychiatrists and other experts on group psychology and mind-control
techniques offered rational explanations of how humans can be
conditioned to commit such irrational acts . Yet the stories
told by those who survived were both fearsomely fascinating and
ultimately inexplicable. How could such idealistic, if naive, people
set out to build an idyllic haven from modern society’s many pressures
and turn it into a hellish colony of death? This is how the Jonestown
dream turned into a nightmare:
