Jim Jones specifically chose Guyana because of its strained relationship with the United States, and the massacre did nothing to improve this relationship.

The People's Temple was intially founded in Indiana, and in the early days - before decades of heavy drug use and paranoia took their toll on Jim Jones - one of the primary focuses of the church was promoting racial integration and equality between blacks and whites. This message wasn't terribly popular in Indiana at the time, so Jones moved the church out to California, where they eventually landed in San Francisco. The church exploded in popularity, and Jones was dividing his time between overseeing the different branches, travelling the world, managing the church's sizable charitable organizations, raising his own family and gaining political influence in San Francisco. It appears that he started using drugs during this period; after a handful of people defected from the church and some bad press began popping up, Jones became paranoid and convinced himself that the United States was no longer safe for his church, as he believed a nuclear holocaust was coming.

Initially Jones wanted to found Jonestown in Brazil, as he had heard it was relatively safe from nuclear war, but he struggled with the language barrier. He considered Canada and Barbados, but eventually settled on Guyana - Guyana is the only English-speaking country in South America, it had no extradition treaty with the United States, and under the rule of Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, it had become a socialist-leaning nation. Guyana also has a large black population, and he hoped that they would be more open to his mission of racially integrating blacks and whites. The Guyanese government was willing to support Jonestown, as they purportedly wanted to use it as an example of a successful socialist agricultural commune. The land that they leased to Jonestown also happened to be located near the disputed territory between Guyana and Venezuela, and allegedly, they believed that parking the Americans in the middle of the land dispute would discourage Venezuela from making an attack on Guyanese soil.

Jim Jones also liked that Guyana was poor and still in the early stages of being an independent country, because he believed that he could gain great political influence relatively easily. The details of Jones' relationship with the Guyanese government are shadowy, but there appears to have been cooperation between the Guyanese government and Jonestown, as Jones was able to import large quantities of drugs and weapons into his compound.

The massacre brought a lot of negative attention onto Guyana and its socialist Prime Minister. The Americans were not able to extradite or persecute any of the surviving members of Peoples' Temple that had a hand in the massacre, save for one. Larry Layton was a Peoples' Temple member who pretended to defect from the cult in order to assassinate US Congressman Leo Ryan; the Guyanese courts found him not guilty by reason of brainwashing, but the USA were able to extradite him under a statute against harming "Internationally Protected Persons". He is the only person to ever be indicted by a US court for his role in the violence.

Within Guyana, political opponents blamed Prime Minister Forbes Burnham for the massacre. The controversy did fade from public memory, but in the post-Jonestown years, Burnham leaned even further toward socialism and away from the United States. He tried to strengthen relationships with Cuba and held incredibly suspicious elections, which did not improve the country's standing in the United States. After his sudden death during surgery in 1985, he was succeeded by Vice President Desmond Hoyt, who relaxed many of his predecessors authoritarian policies. President Jimmy Carter visited Guyana in 1992 to try to establish fair elections, which Hoyt agreed to. Relations between the two countries have improved steadily since then, and today relations are much better than they were before or after the Jonestown massacre.