Jesuit Reductions

They matter because they were the largest and longest-lived attempt in the Americas to build a colonial society for Indians on a legal footing of freedom. The Guaraní of the missions were vassals of the Spanish crown, not encomienda Indians: they paid tribute directly to the king, could not legally be bought or sold, and were governed — on paper, and to a real if limited extent in practice — by their own elected council, in their own language, with their own caciques ennobled and exempted from tax. They also fought: the mission militias were the standing army of the Río de la Plata frontier for two centuries.

They matter, secondly, because they became an argument. Voltaire put a Jesuit Paraguay into Candide; Montesquieu praised it; nineteenth-century liberals called it a despotism; twentieth-century writers called it the first socialist commonwealth; the 1986 film The Mission turned it into a parable about the Church and empire that gets almost every date and institution wrong. Almost everything written about the reductions has been written to prove something.

And they matter, thirdly, because of the record they left. No other Indian population in colonial South America was counted so often or so carefully. The annual censuses of the thirty towns, from the 1640s to 1807, give a demographic series unmatched anywhere else in the Spanish empire: growth to 141,182 people in 1732, collapse in the epidemics of the 1730s, recovery to 104,483 by 1755, and a long decline to about 38,000 by 1803.

The map draws the reductions from 1595 to 1768. The start date is fourteen years too early — the first town was founded in 1609 and the Jesuit province of Paraguay was erected in 1608–1609 — and is best read as a border-data artefact marking the Jesuit presence in the region rather than any reduction. The end date is right: 1768 is the year the towns passed to royal administrators.

At a glance

Why did the Jesuits come to Paraguay?

Asunción was founded in 1537 and for seventy years its Spaniards lived off Guaraní labour without ever controlling Guaraní country. The Guaraní were farmers: maize, cassava, sweet potato, beans, cotton, tobacco, in clearings that moved every few years. They were also mobile, and their villages were led by chiefs — the Spanish borrowed the Arawak word cacique; the Guaraní word was tubichá — whose authority rested on descent, eloquence and success in war, and whose people could and did leave when they disliked a leader. That mobility defeated the encomienda. A settler who was granted the labour of a village found, often within a season, that the village had moved.

The Jesuits arrived in Asunción on 11 August 1588 and were received with ceremony; two of them went on to the Guayrá, the country of the upper Paraná, and reported a population dense enough to justify a mission. What they proposed was a bargain the crown had already been groping towards: gather the Indians into permanent towns under royal protection, teach them doctrine, and pay the crown a tribute in return for exemption from private service. The reduction was the institutional form of that bargain, and the Society of Jesus, with its discipline, its linguistic training and its exemption from the ordinary parochial system, was the obvious body to run it.

The first town came from below. In 1609 a group of caciques from the region south of the Tebicuary, led by a chief named Arapysandú, asked the governor, Hernandarias de Saavedra, for missionaries; the bishop had no secular clergy to spare, and the Jesuit provincial, Diego de Torres, sent two men, Marcial de Lorenzana and Francisco de San Martín. They left Asunción on 16 December 1609, crossed the Tebicuary, and said the first mass at Arapysandú's settlement. The town is usually dated to 1609 — the municipality of San Ignacio Guazú keeps 29 December — although some accounts put its formal establishment in early 1610, and it was moved twice, in 1628 and 1667, before settling where it stands.

A year later, far to the north-east, two other Jesuits, José Cataldino and Simón Maceta, founded Loreto and San Ignacio Miní in the Guayrá. The name of the first town, San Ignacio Guazú — "the great" — was coined to distinguish it from San Ignacio Miní, "the little", founded the same year in the Guayrá, far to the north-east. The duplication has confused readers ever since.

Why did the Guaraní agree? Because the alternative was worse. From the 1590s the settlers of Asunción and Villa Rica raided the interior for labour, and from the 1600s the slave-hunters of São Paulo were already probing the Guayrá. A reduction offered a wall, firearms, iron tools, and a chief's charter of privileges. Recent scholarship — Barbara Ganson's The Guaraní under Spanish Rule, and Guillermo Wilde's Religión y poder en las misiones de guaraníes — treats the missions not as a Jesuit imposition but as a joint enterprise in which caciques bargained for position and their people for protection. The petition of 1609 is the founding document of that reading.

What did the bandeirantes do to the Guayrá?

The Guayrá was the most exposed of the mission fields: a fertile, well-watered country of a dozen or so towns strung along the upper Paraná, in what is now the Brazilian state of Paraná, five hundred kilometres from the nearest Spanish garrison and much closer to São Paulo. Its people were Guaraní, its product was labour, and from the 1610s the bandeiras — armed expeditions from São Paulo, in Portuguese America, mounted by descendants of Portuguese settlers and their Indian allies — came for it.

The legal cover was the "just war" and the resgate: Indians captured in a lawful war could be enslaved, and Indians "rescued" from cannibals could be held for a term. In practice the bandeirantes took whoever was in reach, marched them to São Paulo and sold them, and the Guaraní of the missions, being settled and Christian, were the easiest target in the interior. The great raid came in 1628–29, when Antônio Raposo Tavares led a force into the Guayrá that broke the mission chain. Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, the superior of the Guayrá missions and the best witness we have, described what happened at the towns of San Antonio and San Miguel: the raiders herded the people into the church and killed them there as in a slaughterhouse, stripped the ornaments, poured the holy oils on the floor, and carried off the rest in chains.

Montoya's Conquista espiritual, printed in Madrid in 1639, is a polemic and a masterpiece, and its numbers have to be handled with care. He puts the captives in the tens of thousands; there is no independent count, and the demographic loss was catastrophic whatever the exact figure. What is not in doubt is the result: by 1631 the surviving towns on the upper Paraná could not be defended, and Montoya obtained permission to move them.

The migration of 1631 was the largest organised movement of Indians in colonial South America. Montoya assembled the people of Loreto and San Ignacio Miní — and others who joined on the way — built more than 700 rafts and canoes, and took them down the Paraná, then up the Uruguay, to the region of the Yabebirí. He says that more than 12,000 people embarked, and that they alone escaped the deluge. The journey took months. People drowned, starved and died of disease; the towns were refounded as San Ignacio Miní and Nuestra Señora de Loreto in what is now the Argentine province of Misiones, where their ruins still stand.

The consequences shaped everything that followed. The mission field moved south, out of the bandeirantes' reach and into the corridor between the Paraná and the Uruguay, where it would grow to thirty towns. The Guayrá was emptied of its missions for good. And the Jesuits concluded that a mission that could not defend itself would not survive, which meant arming the Guaraní — a decision that turned a missionary province into a military power on the frontier.

Why did the Guaraní fight at Mbororé?

By 1638 the bandeirantes had turned on the Tape, the country east of the Uruguay in what is now Rio Grande do Sul, and the missions there were being destroyed in the same way. The Jesuit superior, Claudio Ruyer, asked the governor of Paraguay for permission to resist and got it, with the crown's blessing: the Guaraní were vassals, and vassals could bear arms against the king's enemies. The missions began to make gunpowder, cast small cannon, and train companies of musketeers and archers.

In 1640 a large bandeira under Jerónimo Pedroso de Barros and Manuel Pires came down the Uruguay in canoes and rafts, heading for the missions of the upper river. Ruyer concentrated the Guarani of the threatened towns — the sources speak of some 4,000 fighting men — and blocked the river at the stream of Mbororé, near the present Argentine town of Panambí. The battle began at two in the afternoon on 11 March 1641 and lasted, on and off, for a week.

The mission-side accounts give the bandeirantes 300 canoes, 450 men with firearms and 2,500 Tupi archers, against a mission flotilla of seventy canoes and 800 men with several thousand more on the bank. These figures come from the mission side and cannot be checked; what can be said is that the Guarani had cannon mounted on rafts, that they fought in formed companies under their own captains — Abiarú and Ñeenguirú are the names that survive — and that the Paulista force broke. It retreated overland, was caught again at its stockade on the Acaraguá, and dispersed. A relief expedition the following year failed in the same way.

Mbororé ended the bandeirante threat to the Paraná missions. It also confirmed an institution: the mission militia, drilled and mounted, which the crown used for the rest of the colonial period. A report to the crown in the 1740s claimed that the thirty towns could still put 12,000 to 14,000 armed men into the field, even after the smallpox and famine of the preceding years, and that they had done so at their own cost in arms, horses and mules. The Guaraní did not simply defend the missions at Mbororé; they became the garrison of the Río de la Plata.

How was a reduction laid out and run?

The plan was the same everywhere, and it was a Spanish plan, not a Guarani one: a rectangular plaza, the church along one side with a portico and a bell tower, the Jesuits' house and the school beside it, the cabildo opposite, workshops — carpentry, weaving, smithing, music — and rows of houses under a continuous arcade, each with its plot. Behind the town lay the common fields and the orchard; beyond them the estancias. The best surviving example, Trinidad del Paraná, covers about eight hectares, and its church, sacristy, cloister and schoolrooms are still legible.

Towns were big by the standards of the frontier: at the peak in 1732 the thirty averaged about 4,700 people, and Yapeyú and Candelaria were larger still. By the 1790s the average had fallen to about 1,500. Two Jesuits ran each: the cura, who had the cure of souls and the real authority, and a companion, usually a priest but sometimes a lay brother with a trade. Above them stood a superior, who lived at Candelaria and visited; and in Buenos Aires and Santa Fe the order kept procurators, from 1627 and 1662 respectively, who sold the missions' produce and bought what they needed.

The day was regulated by the bell. Mass before dawn, catechism, work in the fields or the workshops, the rosary in the evening; feast days with processions, music and dance, which the Guaraní took to with enthusiasm and which the Jesuits encouraged as the outer form of a new religion. Music was the showpiece: the missions trained choirs and orchestras, built organs and copied polyphony, and the standard astonished visitors. Muratori, the Modenese librarian who compiled their reports into the best-selling account of 1743 without ever crossing the Atlantic, described choirs and orchestras performing European polyphony to a standard he clearly thought remarkable.

Discipline was real and physical. The Jesuits flogged, put people in the stocks and sent out parties to bring back those who had fled to the forest. Marriage was early and arranged — fifteen for girls, seventeen for boys — and monogamy enforced. The priests' own accounts are soaked in a contempt for Guaraní "laziness" that says more about the labour regime than about the Guaraní: Hernández, the order's own historian, quotes a colleague who called the Indians slack and idle by nature, which is what employers usually say about people who work to their own calendar.

What the rules could not do was make the Guaraní into Spaniards. Wilde's study of the mission archives shows a population that kept its own notions of the sacred, buried its dead in its own way, consulted shamans whom the Jesuits prosecuted as hechiceros, and moved in and out of the towns as circumstances required. His formula for the mission — between coercion and consent — is the right one: the reductions were neither a prison nor a congregation of the docile.

Who governed a mission town?

On paper, the Guaraní governed themselves. Each town had a cabildo on the Spanish model — the institution that ran a municipality in Castile and the Indies — with a corregidor, a teniente, two alcaldes ordinarios (of the first and second vote), two alcaldes de la hermandad, an alférez real, four regidores, an alguacil mayor, a mayordomo and a secretary. The elections were held in the first days of January, the outgoing council choosing the new one; the corregidor alone was not elected but appointed by the governor on the recommendation of the missionary, and he usually served for life.

The crown regulated this in detail. A royal cédula of 28 December 1743, issued at Buen Retiro after a long enquiry, confirmed the existing arrangement, required the elections to be held in the presence of the cura and after consulting him, and listed the officers' duties, including those of the mayordomo who managed the common property and the Indian accountants, fiscals and storekeepers under him. It was, in effect, a charter for the mission towns — the nearest thing the Guaraní ever had to one.

Below and beside the cabildo stood the caciques. They kept their titles, their precedence and their exemption from tribute (a privilege the crown confirmed repeatedly, over the objections of officials who doubted that Guaraní "caciques" were real nobles); they sat at the front of the church, held the best land, and supplied the town's captains in war. Spanish law gave them criminal jurisdiction over their people, short of death or mutilation.

The real distribution of power was less tidy. The cura could veto, admonish, withhold the sacraments, and report to the governor; the cabildo could petition, obstruct, and — as the 1750s showed — organise. The Guaraní officers were not puppets: they ran the stores, kept the accounts, wrote to the king, and in the 1750s produced a body of letters and memorials in Guaraní and Spanish that has survived in the archives. Wilde's work on Guarani literacy in the missions is the best corrective to the image of a mute population: these were people who knew how to use a notary.

The strongest evidence for Guarani political capacity is the Guarani War itself. When the crown ordered seven towns to move, it was the cabildos that organised the resistance, town by town, and the officers of the cabildo — corregidores, alféreces, captains — who commanded. At Yapeyú the corregidor and most of the cabildo opposed the war; the rebels replaced the corregidor with a chief of their own choosing. That is not the behaviour of a theocracy's congregation.

What did the missions produce?

Food first. The Guaraní grew maize, cassava, sweet potatoes, beans, pumpkins and peanuts, and the Jesuits added wheat, which ripened but degenerated after a few seasons, and introduced citrus, figs and European vegetables. Each household had its plot — the abambaé, "that which belongs to the person" — and the alcaldes inspected the plots every year to make sure nobody had planted too little. The labour season ran from Corpus Christi to Christmas; everyone worked it, including the artisans, who closed their workshops for weeks at a time.

On top of the household plots lay the tupambaé, "that which belongs to God" — the common fields and herds, worked by turns or by hired labour, whose produce paid for the church, the school, the support of the sick, widows and orphans, the feeding of travellers and the tribute. The distinction is the most important thing to grasp about the mission economy, because it destroys both the "everything was shared" and the "everything was private" versions of the story. There was private property, in plots and in a few head of cattle; there was also a corporate estate, and the Jesuits ran it.

Yerba mate was the money crop. The tree grew wild in the forests of the upper Paraná and upper Uruguay, and the missions organised annual expeditions to harvest it: about a hundred men from each Paraná town, with provisions, iron tools and hides for packing, three or four months of cutting, drying and crushing in a camp in the forest, and six weeks of travel there and back. The Uruguay towns went by mule and cart — sixty to eighty carts, 250 oxen, five hundred to a thousand head of cattle for food — a logistical operation on the scale of an army's. Only five or six of the thirty towns had planted groves of their own by 1742, which tells you how much of the trade depended on long-distance foraging in territory that was not always safe.

Cattle came second, and in the east they came first. The towns held estancias on the grasslands — Yapeyú's was the largest, with La Cruz, Santo Tomé and San Miguel — and the herds were measured in tens of thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands: Hernández, describing what the seven eastern towns were asked to give up in 1750, puts their cattle at more than half a million head. Hides, tallow and dried meat went to Buenos Aires and Santa Fe; the cattle also fed the yerba expeditions and paid the militia.

Cotton was the third leg: grown in the towns, spun and woven by women into the coarse cloth called lienzo, which clothed the population and was sold outside. Add tobacco, sugar, honey, timber and the produce of the orchards, and you have an economy that was diversified, export-oriented and run on compulsory labour — a colonial economy, in short, with the unusual feature that the proceeds stayed in Indian hands, under Jesuit management, instead of flowing to a private encomendero.

The accounts were kept per town, in the procurators' books in Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, which recorded each town's credits and debts as its consignments were sold and its orders filled. Tools, salt, iron, cloth, paper, wine for the Mass and ornaments for the church came back upriver. The trade was substantial enough to alarm the merchants of Asunción, who complained for a century that the missions undersold them; and it is the origin of the legend of the Jesuit treasure, which assumes that what was not spent on the towns must have been hidden. The inventories taken at the expulsion show the opposite: debts, unfinished buildings, and stores of yerba and cloth rather than chests of silver.

Were the Guaraní better off?

Better off than whom, and by what measure? Legally, the mission Guaraní were in a stronger position than almost any other Indians in the Spanish empire. They were free vassals of the crown, not encomienda Indians; they could not be granted to a settler, bought, sold or drafted into the mita; they were exempt from personal service and, in practice, from the tithe, which the bishops contested; they could own property, sue in the royal courts, and petition the king. Their towns were legally pueblos de indios with their own cabildos, which is more than could be said for the Indians who worked the estates of the Paraguayans.

Materially the case is more mixed. The mission houses were better than the huts of the forest — adobe walls, tile roofs, beds and chests — and the churches were among the finest buildings in the region. Clothing, tools, iron, salt and music were available in quantities no independent Guaraní community could command. But the price was a regime of compulsory labour, corporal punishment, arranged marriage, confinement for adultery and flight, and a mortality that no amount of nursing could offset.

That mortality is the hardest evidence in the file. The mission censuses show a population that grew strongly when the regime was in balance — from the 1640s to 1732, and again from 1741 to 1755 — and fell sharply when it was not. The smallpox and famine of 1733–1740 cut the mission population by nearly half, to 73,910; the peak had been 141,182 in 1732. Recovery carried it back to 104,483 by 1755; the Guarani War and its epidemics brought it to 85,266 by 1767. Maeder's reading of the series is that the Guaraní grew when the mission economy served them and declined when the crown's demands — tribute, drafts, war — took precedence over the mission's own. That is a sophisticated argument, and it is more convincing than either the "Jesuit paradise" or the "demographic sink" version.

There is a further point that the Jesuits' defenders rarely mention: the missions never produced a single Guaraní priest. After the expulsion Bucareli promised to ordain them, and did not. The first Guaraní priest, Javier Tubichapotá of Santiago, was ordained in Buenos Aires through the patronage of the last royal administrator, and Hernández could find no other. A century and a half of Christian instruction produced musicians, scribes, accountants, mayordomos and militia captains, but not clergy — which tells you what the Society thought the Guaraní were for.

What was the Guarani War?

In January 1750 Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Madrid, settling the boundary of their South American empires. Portugal gave up Colonia del Sacramento, on the north bank of the Río de la Plata in what is now Uruguay; Spain gave up the Seven Missions of the East — San Borja, San Nicolás, San Luis, San Lorenzo, San Miguel, San Juan and Santo Ángel — seven towns on the east bank of the Uruguay, in what is now Rio Grande do Sul. The treaty was a diplomatic success and a human catastrophe: some 30,000 Guaraní were told to abandon their towns, their orchards, their herds and their dead, and move to the west bank.

They refused. The first resistance was legal — petitions, memorials, appeals to the crown — and then physical. The Spanish and Portuguese demarcation commissioners, the Marqués de Valdelirios and Gomes Freire de Andrade, arrived to find the towns empty of compliance and full of armed men. The Jesuit commissioner Lope Luis Altamirano, sent from Europe in 1752 to oversee the transfer, found that his authority counted for little. Fighting began in 1753 and continued into 1756: a war of ambushes, river crossings and stockaded camps, fought by mission militias against regulars and Indian auxiliaries.

The Guaraní command was not unified, and the sources name three leaders: Rafael Paracatú of San Javier, José Tiarayú, the alférez real of San Miguel, and Ñeenguirú, the corregidor of Concepción. They were not a general staff; they were office-holders of the mission cabildos, using the institutions they had to organise a resistance that the crown called rebellion. The end came in February 1756 at Caibaté, where a combined Spanish-Portuguese force broke the Guarani army and killed some 1,500 people; Tiarayú had been killed shortly before.

The Jesuits were divided, and the division is revealing. The provincial of Paraguay, José Barreda, opposed the transfer; most of the seventy Jesuits working in the missions disliked it; but the general of the Society, Ignatius Visconti, ordered obedience to the crown, and Altamirano enforced it. What kept the order loyal was obedience, not sympathy. The crown's propagandists turned this into a Jesuit conspiracy, and the war became the strongest argument in Europe for the order's suppression.

The war ended in a diplomatic accident. In 1761 the Treaty of El Pardo annulled the exchange of territories, and the seven towns stayed Spanish — but the damage was done. The crown had learned that the missions were a military and political force it did not control; the Guaraní had learned that the crown would move them if it suited; and Europe had learned that the Jesuits of Paraguay commanded armies.

Why were the Jesuits expelled?

The decree came from Madrid on 27 February 1767. It ordered the expulsion of every member of the Society of Jesus from Spain, the Indies and the Philippines, the seizure of its property, and its perpetual exclusion. Its language is worth reading, because it is the language of a modern state disposing of a rival. Charles III acts by what he calls the supreme economic authority that God has deposited in his hands, for the protection of his vassals and the respect of his crown, and he reserves his reasons: the grave and just motives, he says, remain in his royal person. There was no trial, no charge, no list of offences. The decree also fixed pensions: 100 pesos a year for priests, 90 for lay brothers, to be paid from the proceeds of the confiscated property.

The background was European. Portugal had expelled the Jesuits in 1759 and confiscated their property; France followed in 1764; the Bourbon courts were convinced that the Society was a state within the state, with its own general, its own law and its own wealth. In Spain the trigger was the Esquilache riots of March 1766, blamed on the Jesuits by their enemies, and the circulation of the forged Monita secreta. In America the argument was more concrete: the Jesuits held the best land, the best missions, the frontier, and the Indians. The Guaraní War supplied the proof that they could raise an army.

In the Río de la Plata the execution was brisk. The governor of Buenos Aires, Francisco de Paula Bucareli, received the order in 1767 and carried it out in the cities, the colleges and the estancias; in the missions it was enforced between July and August 1768, by commissioners who read the decree to each community and removed the two priests. The seventy Jesuits of the Paraguay missions were taken downriver to Buenos Aires, shipped to Spain and scattered; a number died within a few years, and few ever returned. Their books, their instruments, their maps and their pharmacy went into the king's warehouses and were inventoried, sold or lost.

The expulsion was not a consequence of the Guarani War in any strict sense: the war had ended twelve years earlier and the treaty that caused it had been annulled. It was a consequence of a larger project — the Bourbon state's determination to be the only sovereign in its empire, to tax and administer the Indians directly, and to destroy the corporate bodies that stood between. The Jesuits were the largest such body, and the most conspicuously successful.

What happened after 1768?

The crown replaced the Society with the state, and the state did it badly. Bucareli divided the thirty towns between two interim governors — Francisco Bruno de Zavala for the ten Uruguay towns, Juan Francisco de la Riva Herrera for the twenty on the Paraná — and appointed a secular administrator and a parish priest to each. The common property was to be inventoried, the tribute collected, the Indians paid wages and the lands divided. A Junta de Temporalidades in Buenos Aires administered the confiscated estates. The priests who replaced the Jesuits were Franciscans, Mercedarians and seculars, few of them Guarani speakers, and none of them with the Jesuits' authority over the town's labour.

The economic results were immediate and bad. The new administration had to pay the same tribute, the tithes, the salaries of administrators and priests, and the costs of a bigger bureaucracy; it therefore multiplied the community labour drafts, and it sold yerba and cloth as fast as it could, at the expense of the food crops and the upkeep of the buildings. Maeder's account of the missions' accounts between 1768 and 1803 is a study in institutional failure: the towns were milked, the herds were plundered, the orchards decayed, and the population fell faster than it had ever fallen under the Jesuits.

The numbers are stark. In 1768 the thirty towns held 88,828 people. By 1803 they held a little over 38,000. Some of the loss was flight — the Guarani left for Corrientes, Santa Fe, Asunción and the new ranches, where wages were paid and the priest was distant — and some was epidemic. In 1801, during a short war between Spain and Portugal, the seven eastern towns were occupied by Portuguese forces from Rio Grande do Sul and stayed Brazilian; their people, again, were not consulted.

The nineteenth century finished the work. The wars of independence made the missions a recruiting ground and a battlefield, and Guaraní militias fought in them and afterwards in the Paraguayan and Argentine armies. The War of the Triple Alliance of 1864–1870 devastated the region and the mission population with it. By the time the ruins were photographed in the twentieth century, the towns were farms and the archives were in Buenos Aires, Asunción and Rio de Janeiro.

How has the story been told?

The first telling was the Jesuits' own. Montoya's Conquista espiritual (1639), Nicolás del Techo's Latin history of the province (1673) and the annual letters sent to Rome presented the reductions as the proof that the Gospel could produce civility: an argument aimed at Europe, and it worked. Muratori's Il cristianesimo felice (1743) — a best-seller translated into several languages, written by a Modenese librarian from Jesuit reports — gave the enlightened public a Paraguay of orderly towns, industrious Indians and patriarchal priests, which was exactly what the philosophes wanted to hear. Voltaire put a Jesuit Paraguay into Candide and discussed it in the Essai sur les mœurs; Montesquieu praised it in L'Esprit des lois. The "Jesuit state" was invented by its admirers before it was attacked by its enemies.

The enemies' version came next. Pombaline and Bourbon polemic described a hidden empire of gold, ruled by fanatical priests who kept the Indians in childhood, and the nineteenth-century liberals — in Argentina, above all — repeated it: the missions were a theocracy, a state within the state, the antithesis of the republic. In the twentieth century the wheel turned again. Philip Caraman's The Lost Paradise (1975) and C. J. McNaspy's Lost Cities of Paraguay (1982) restored the Jesuit view, and a parallel literature made the reductions into the first socialist commonwealth: common property, no money, labour according to need.

The scholarly revision of the last forty years has dismantled both versions. Magnus Mörner's study of the Jesuits' economic activity in the La Plata region, Ernesto Maeder's demographic and administrative history, Barbara Ganson's The Guaraní under Spanish Rule and Guillermo Wilde's anthropology of the missions all describe a negotiated order: coercive, paternalist, improvised, and dependent on Guarani consent and Guarani institutions. Julia Sarreal's socioeconomic history of the missions (2014) takes the same approach into the ledgers.

Then there is the film. The Mission, directed by Roland Joffé from a screenplay by Robert Bolt, with a score by Ennio Morricone, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1986 and is the reason most people outside South America have heard of the reductions at all. It is a beautiful film and a bad history. Its central figure, Cardinal Altamirano, is a papal legate who closes the missions; the historical Altamirano was a Jesuit commissioner sent by his own general to enforce a treaty, and he was not a cardinal. The film fuses three separate events: the Guayrá flight of 1631 (the waterfall and the rafts), the battle at Mbororé in 1641 (the last stand), and the Guarani War of 1750–1756 (the treaty). It dates the catastrophe to the 1750s and attributes it to the Church, when the crown did it in 1767. And its Guaraní are scenery: they accept the faith almost instantly, sing beautifully, and die while the Europeans argue about them. In the record they petitioned, negotiated, litigated, deserted, and fought under their own officers.

None of this makes the film worthless. It caught something true that the documents often hide: that the reductions were a collision of two ideas of the good life, and that the Guaraní paid for both. But a reader who wants the history should start with Montoya and end with Maeder, not with Robert Bolt.

What survives today?

The Argentine missions of San Ignacio Miní, Loreto, Santa Ana and Santa María la Mayor were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1983, with a boundary modification in 1984; the Brazilian ruin of São Miguel das Missões, with its museum of mission sculpture, shares that inscription; the Paraguayan towns of Trinidad del Paraná and Jesús de Tavarangue were inscribed in 1993. Trinidad, founded in 1706, is the best-preserved urban layout: eight hectares of plaza, church, cloister and houses, with the stone carving still sharp.

The people did not disappear. The Guaraní language is an official language of Paraguay and the everyday speech of much of its population; Guarani communities live across Paraguay, Misiones and Corrientes in Argentina, and in southern Brazil, many of them in land disputes over territories the missions once held. The missions' legacy is not a state but a language, a musical tradition, a set of craft skills and a memory of a different way of being Indian under colonial rule.

The archives are the other survival. The annual letters, the censuses, the cabildo books, the inventories of 1768 and the Guaraní letters of the 1750s are among the richest indigenous-language records of the colonial world, and they are still being read. The best of the recent work uses them to give the Guaraní back their own history: not the objects of a Jesuit experiment, but the makers of a bargain that held for a century and a half and then was broken by the crown.

Common myths about the Jesuit Reductions

Timeline of the Jesuit Reductions

What the map shows next

At 1750 on the map the territory is at its fullest extent — thirty towns, the seven eastern missions still on the Spanish side of the line, the frontier with Portuguese Rio Grande do Sul running along the Uruguay. Move forward six years to 1756 on the map and the map cannot show the war that is being fought on that frontier, but the towns it destroyed are all inside the shaded area.

At 1767 on the map the last full year of Jesuit government is drawn; at 1768 on the map the territory appears for the final time, already administered by the crown. After that year the map hands the region to the successor states: Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, whose borders were drawn over the missions' lands in the nineteenth century.