Below is an excerpt taken from today's Kaieteur News.
Over time there have been intermittent schemes to clear and memorialize the site.
No political leader was more adept at exploiting the idea or realizing its failure than Forbes Burnham, who led the country from independence in 1966 until his death in 1985. His aspirations to create a unique Guyanese path to socialism — through a top-heavy program of massively nationalized industry and agriculture in the interior — aggressively chased off foreign investment.
Mr. Burnham welcomed not only Jim Jones but other soi-disant radical movements into Guyana, turning the country into an ideological Disneyworld for the charismatic and the disaffected in the late ’70s.
In 1978, Mr. Burnham’s unpopularity was growing and his overconfident austerity economy was failing. Guyanese-style socialist development meant not only nationalization of foreign companies but strict laws against exports, which led to crippling food shortages. The local Georgetown newspapers at the time had many more headlines on garlic and onion smuggling than the murder-suicides at Jonestown.
“When it happened, a lot of us wanted to preserve the site,” Georgetown mayor Hamilton Green says, “but it was impossible.” Mr. Green had been a ranking government official when Mr. Burnham ran the country. “Burnham just said no.” Mr. Green’s wife, Shirley Field-Ridley, who died in 1982, was minister of information in the Burnham cabinet, and as the evening of Nov. 18 unfolded, the country was overwhelmed by what had taken place.
“We heard the death toll go from 10, to 100, to 300. What could we do? We only had 30 body bags in the whole country,” Mr. Green says. Like others in Georgetown, he darkly hinted of CIA involvement in Jonestown. There were rumors.
Most of the Guyanese officials who were in power in the 1970s are dead, and questions as to how Mr. Jones’ sect flourished mostly unhindered in the jungle are simply impossible to answer. Mr. Burnham died in 1985; his agriculture minister Dr. Ptolemy Reid, whose portfolio brought him into the most direct contact with Mr. Jones, died in 2004.