An adventure tour group is planning to begin taking visitors on morbid tours of the site of the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, and Bay Area family members of victims, and one of the near-victims herself, former Congresswoman Jackie Speier, are saying "hell no."

Charismatic preacher turned cult leader Jim Jones took his San Francisco congregation of Peoples Temple members to Guyana to live at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in mid 1977 in order to escape growing negative media attention in SF. Jones had entertained a paranoid sense of persecution by the government and media over several years, which had led to the establishment of the Guyana settlement as a contingency plan. The group leased 3,800 acres of mostly infertile, jungle land about 150 miles west of the capital of Georgetown, and 500 Temple members had gone down there to begin construction around 1974.

In November 1978, Peninsula Congressman Leo Ryan took a couple of staff members and an NBC camera crew down to Jonestown, at the urging of constituents who worried about family members there. The visit prompted Jones to enact a mass death plan, sending gunmen to shoot Ryan and his entourage as they were boarding a plane on the local airstrip the next day. Ryan's aide, Jackie Speier, was shot multiple times but survived, and later was elected to his seat in Congress.

A total of 918 Peoples Temple members died that day, drinking poisoned Flavor-Aid, giving the poison to their children first. Members who attempted to escape were shot at, though some managed not to ingest any poison, and others succeeded in escaping or had assignments from Jones that took them elsewhere.

Temple members, who were majority Black, hailed largely from the Bay Area, and there are multiple memorials for them here, including one at East Oakland's Evergreen Cemetery.

As NBC News now reports, a group called Wanderlust Adventures, based in South America, has already sold tickets for a January trip to Jonestown for $650. The founder of the group, Roselyn Sewcharran, has characterized the tourism effort as arising from the same curiosity people have about visiting the sites of other tragedies and atrocities, like Chernobyl and Nazi concentration camps.

"The thing is, Jonestown remains a tragic part of Guyana’s history, but it is also an event of global significance," Sewcharran says to NBC. "It offers critical lessons about cult psychology, manipulation and abuse of power."

And, Sewcharran adds, "These sites attract visitors, not to dwell on tragedy, but to understand the events ... honor those affected and ensure that such histories are neither repeated nor forgotten."

Speier and others are now trying to urge the Guyanese government to shut this tour down, with spear telling KTVU this week, "I was horrified because [Jonestown] doesn't deserve to be a tourist attraction. And for a company to think this is adventure tourism is missing the mark."

Speier adds, "This is a very remote area of Guyana, in the middle of the jungle deep, in a jungle with a remote airstrip." She suggests that if a memorial were to be set up in Guyana, it should be in Georgetown.

Jordan Vilchez, 67, who went to Jonestown with her family at age 14 but was in Georgetown on the day of the mass suicide, tells the Guardian she has mixed feelings about a tour group visiting the site.

"I just missed dying by one day," Vilchez says. Her two sisters and two nephews were among the victims.

She says Guyana, which has very little tourism, has every right to profit from people's desire to go there, but, "on the other hand, I just feel like any situation where people were manipulated into their deaths should be treated with respect."

Jynona Norwood, who lost 27 family members in Jonestown, tells KTVU, "We heal, but you never forget it." And, Norwood says of the tour group, "I would not support them making money and not doing anything good with the money that they make off the tourist attraction, if they're charging. It would be shameful."

Guyana's tourism minister tells KTVU that he is aware of the pushback, but it doesn't sound like they will be changing their minds. Brush-clearing has already taken place a the site, and tour-goers will be taken by boat from Georgetown to the Port Kaituma airstrip where Congressman Ryan and others lost their lives, for an overnight stay in the jungle.

Previously: Memorial for 45th Anniversary of Jonestown in East Oakland Saturday Remembers Victims, Honors Survivors

Top image: Dead bodies lie around the compound of the People's Temple cult November 18, 1978 after the over 900 members of the cult, led by Reverend Jim Jones, died from drinking cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid; they were victims of the largest mass suicide in modern history. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)