Latest update December 31st, 2024 3:30 AM
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Jonestown memorial unveiled in California
The tombstone where more than one third of the victims were buried given that they could not be identified or retrieved by any family members.
Recently in Oakland California in the United States of America, a memorial was unveiled in memory of the 913 citizens who were murdered in Guyana 30 years ago.
The company building the California memorial to the 1978 Jonestown massacre noted that the memorial has not yet been completed but when it is done there will be a wall bearing the names of the each of the victims.
The first sections of the granite wall were unveiled at a ceremony in Oakland on the anniversary of the November 18, 1978 mass murder-suicide. The rest will be installed late next year.
John Cortez, project manager of Marin Monument Co., told California media operatives that one section of the memorial would be reserved specially for the children who perished at the Guyana compound run by the Rev. Jim Jones.
Locally, Captain Gerry Gouveia has over the years been ardently calling for a memorial to be set up in Guyana to commemorate the Jonestown victims.
He noted that it was embarrassing to see recently when Tracy Parks, a survivor, came to Guyana and had to erect a makeshift monument on the Port Kaituma Airstrip where her mother was gunned down by Jim Jones loyalists.
Gouveia said that it is incumbent on Guyana to establish a memorial where people could go and pay their respects to those that perished on that fateful day—November 18, 1978.
He added that the location could also be used as a reference point for historians, students, “or people who just want to see what happens when an ultimate leader is allowed to foster and fester.”
He noted that Jonestown represents the greatest self-inflicted tragedy. “And I don’t believe that we could allow it to disappear.”
Gouveia also noted that the memory of Jonestown must live, because it was a demonstration of the disease that is human. “It represents the effects of the disease of ultimate power by any one man.”
He pointed to a sign that was hung above the dead body of Jim Jones which read, “Lest we forget the past we are condemned to repeat it.”
About 100 people attended Tuesday’s memorial at the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland California, including some survivors who said Jones had in effect murdered his followers when he ordered them to drink poison after some of his followers had gunned down U.S. congressman Leo Ryan and members of his party.
Jones’s Peoples Temple church had been based in the Bay Area prior to the exodus to Guyana where the ill-fated Jonestown colony was established.
It was dissolved forever in January 1979 but the memory of Jonestown will live on.
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