ABSTRACT
Jonestown would serve as a fine example for the Guyanese, who perhaps would be encouraged to leave the coastal belt for the interior. Many Guyanese now wondered what Forbes Burnham would do about the parliamentary elections required by the fall of 1978. Although Guyana’s economy was passing through difficult times, Forbes Burnham and the faithful were prosperous, contented, and arrogant. The referendum would ask the Guyanese people to decisively alter the constitution. The two-thirds People’s National Congress majority then turned the National Assembly into a Constituent Assembly to draw up a new constitution for Guyana. Most opposition groups, including the Guyana Council of Churches, did not bother to participate in rewriting the constitution, for the government paid little attention to those groups which presented proposals. Fearing a collapse into either absolute despotism or revolutionary violence, some fifty of Guyana’s most important businessmen and professionals urged the formation of a broad-based government of national reconstruction.
