Around 1610, when the Jesuits began their work in what is now Paraguay, then a possession of the Spanish Empire, the Hispanic monarchy began to distrust the encomiendas, the system it had imposed a few years earlier to care for and evangelize the natives of the country.
These indigenous Americans, the “Indians”, had been entrusted to the Spanish who, with the spirit of conquest, had arrived shortly before the newly discovered continent. The king, to reward those adventurers, granted them control of lands and possession of Indians linked to them. The privileged could use them as servants and manual workers on their estates, but they had to protect their lives, as well as their moral formation, and baptize them as soon as possible.
The encomienda system immediately showed its weaknesses. The majority of secular colonizers were barely interested in the life and education of the indigenous people, who ended up enslaved. In reality, although they had the theoretical protection of the generous “laws of the Indies”, in practice they had no freedom or rights whatsoever.
The evident failure of the system, vigorously criticized by writers such as Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, produced a change of attitude in the authorities of the metropolis, especially in the court and in the Council of the Indies. Instead of encouraging secular recruitment of Indians, Hispanic rulers aided religious orders that had moved to America for missionary purposes. These tried to “reduce” and convert to Christianity the dispersed Indians, often nomadic and almost savages, gathering them into urban collectivities, the so-called “reductions.”
The missionaries wanted those Indians to learn to live without problems within peaceful communities, independent of any established political power and with economic autonomy that would allow them to survive without outside help. The inhabitants of these reductions were dedicated to physical and productive work, for example the cultivation of mate, the grinding of cassava or the obtaining of cane sugar. The missionaries controlled these tasks and ensured the safety of natives far from their natural environment.
The first religious to create reductions in America were the Franciscans. Also the Dominicans, the Augustinians and the Mercedarians opened missions in South America. But it was the Jesuits who devoted the most effort to that goal and who had the most spectacular and lasting success.
The reductions in Paraguay have gone down in history as an almost unique example of utopia put into practice, a sample, it seems, of a free, democratic and peaceful society. The adventure was carried out without many difficulties. Voltaire himself, so little friend of the Jesuits, recognized this in his work Essay on Customs. He wrote that they were “a great triumph of humanity,” and he did so in the 18th century, when the reductions still existed and could be visited.
The first provincial father of those lands was the Jesuit Diego de Torres, who had arrived from Spain with just over forty companions at the beginning of the 17th century. The Spanish aristocrat Hernandarias de Saavedra then governed the lands that extend on both sides of the Uruguay and Paraná rivers (corresponding to current Paraguay, southern Brazil and northern Argentina), and the religious settled there.
According to the viceroy of Peru, the highest authority in that area, the governor wanted to favor the work of the missionaries to eliminate the harmful encomiendas. It was for this reason that he concluded a pact with Father Torres: the Jesuits would group into villages and indoctrinate and baptize all the nomadic Indians scattered throughout this region, especially the Guaraníes, but also the Itatines, Tupís and other less numerous ethnic groups. .
The towns would be organized as societies that could be described as democratic, with civil authorities chosen from among their own population. All of them exercised their mandate for twelve months under the discreet tutelage of the founders of the mission. The reductions were established very soon with the interest of all participants. It was not excessively difficult to attract inhabitants who saw a rapid improvement in their material situation.
At first, the missionaries tried to respect the customs of the indigenous people, and were especially respectful of their spoken language. The norms of European civilization were not introduced until much later, trying not to cause rejection. Late in the history of the reductions, Spanish was taught and practiced among the indigenous people.
It has been said that an impartial spectator present at that place would have had the impression of being in a world without problems. But there were external threats.
Father Ruiz Montoya speaks of “mamelucos” to refer to the Portuguese colonizers and certain mestizos from neighboring Brazil, who, especially from the city of São Paulo, organized plundering expeditions (then called “malocas”) to the western lands to obtain riches. and young men and women who could be sold as slaves to European traffickers.
The inhabitants of the reductions had no weapons to defend themselves and easily succumbed to the harquebuses and the ferocity of the Paulistas. Many Jesuits, despite the combative character of their order, repeated the slogan of Saint Thomas Becket: “The Church is not to be defended like a fortress.” Many violent mercenaries and unscrupulous merchants took advantage of this pacifist spirit.
The only thing that some fathers at the head of these threatened reductions did was change their location, moving them to areas closer to the Spanish garrisons, from which if necessary they could ask for help to defend them from the Portuguese.
In 1642 the situation changed. Ruiz Montoya, transferred to Spain, obtained permission from his superiors to purchase firearms and supply them to the Indians of the reductions, to whom he immediately taught their use. The peaceful Guaraní surprised the missionaries by demonstrating that, with a musket in their hands, they were capable of successfully defending their lives, their families, and their homes. The malocas were no longer a threat.
Many years passed without any problems other than those sometimes caused by the civil authorities themselves, who envied the political power and influence of the Jesuits throughout the region. They were suspicious of the independence and prosperity of the reductions, since they ended up being like a state (theocratic, but free) within another state (the Spanish monarchy).
The most serious threat came well into the 18th century. It occurred as a consequence of the campaign against the Jesuits organized by the European Enlightenment and enlightened despotism, embodied in this case by the Bourbons, a powerful dynasty in France, Spain and several states of the Italian peninsula.
Prestigious politicians and intellectuals such as the Portuguese Pombal, the Frenchman Choiseul, the Italian Tanucci, minister in Naples, or the Spanish Floridablanca, Campomanes and Aranda did not give up until they obtained the decrees of expulsion of the Jesuits in their respective countries and, finally, the extinction of the order by Pope Clement XIV in 1773.
The forced departure of the Jesuits from the missions of Paraguay took place a year after their expulsion from peninsular Spain, decreed by King Carlos III in 1767. The ruin of the reductions was immediate. Its administration was entrusted to a civil governor and some inexperienced clerics or religious.
The Indians, deprived of the help and advice to which they were accustomed, abandoned most of the reductions en masse. Some returned to the open countryside, forests and wildlife. Others, the most prepared, went to practice an artisan trade in the nearby large cities, Asunción, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo or Buenos Aires.
In eight years, more than half of the reductions disappeared. At the end of the century, there were barely six or seven left, poor and almost empty, near Asunción.
The restoration of the Society of Jesus in 1814 did not represent the recovery of the reductions. The political situation had changed: the former Hispanic colonies, and among them Paraguay, were already fighting for their independence. On the other hand, missions of this type had lost the urgency they had at the beginning for the Catholic Church. Its history, lasting more than a century and a half, was considered over.
They could be considered that “great triumph of humanity” that Voltaire claimed, perhaps as the first attempt to achieve an extraordinary utopia. But for the enemies of the Society of Jesus they were also an ambitious work, more concerned with obtaining material wealth and the prestige of the order than with the development of an effective civilization that could influence the progress and stability of the indigenous peoples. once their autonomy has been achieved.
This text is part of an article published in number 491 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
