Heroic Leadership

by Chris Lowney

  At the time of Torres's arrival, the encomienda system, established to promote colonization of Spain's overseas possessions, was entrenched in the culture. It hadn't been easy for Spain to entice its citizens to settle in South America. A dangerous ocean voyage left settlers with uncertain economic prospects and far removed from friends and family. The encomienda system had been one of very few carrots the Spanish crown could wave. Encomenderos in South America not only received substantial land grants but also were "entrusted"-the meaning of the root word encomen- dar-with native people to work that land for a designated period each year. The system offered something for everyone: for the encomendero, land and labor; for the Spanish crown, a means of enticing emigrants to settle recently colonized territories; and for the indigenous people, protection and evangelization.

  Protection from what, one might wonder. Well, protection from their enemies. Of course, the indigenous people and their ancestors had been protecting themselves against local enemies for centuries before the Spaniards arrived. The only enemies against whom they lacked protection were the Spanish settlers themselves. It was a convenient if odd exercise in circular logic: encomienda boiled down to protection by the colonials from the colonials. Worse yet, it wasn't long before the designated period of annual service started to become "full-time/all the time." The encomienda system degenerated into thinly veneered slavery, and to its credit the Spanish crown soon responded with laws aimed at the eventual eradication of the system.

  It was eventual, all right. The system was still flourishing in 1609, when Torres declared that he would obey decades-old Spanish laws by ending encomienda on Jesuit estates and rehiring the indigenous laborers as salaried workers. It was no gesture of idealistic innocence. Torres was challenging a system that buttressed the whole regional economy, and he surely knew it. That it was one of his very first acts as Jesuit provincial in Paraguay only heightened its symbolic impact.

  No one applauded. In fact, those whose economic survival depended on encomienda were furious. Torres wrote that the local magistrate made himself scarce to avoid certifying the Jesuit's action, "as he was afraid of the citizens' anger." 18 And the citizens made their displeasure known more directly by "the cutoff of donations and food for some days during which cornmeal was the menu of the [Jesuit] refectory."19 It was to get worse.

  If Torres didn't win many friends by his debut performance, it's not clear he much cared. His sights weren't set on the one or two thousand Spaniards and Creoles hunkered down in Asuncion, Cordoba, or Buenos Aires, but on a population at least one hundred times larger and scattered all over the Rio de la Plata region. The Guarani, Guaycuru, and other indigenous tribes weren't very likely to come calling at Jesuit houses in Asuncion or elsewhere. So Torres dispersed his Jesuits along the Paraguay and Parana Rivers to find them. After establishing trust with local tribes, each Jesuit team worked with a tribe to construct a small settlement. The Jesuits called these towns reducciones (reductions) after their aspiration to "reduce" the seminomadic tribes to permanent settlements. One of the very first settlements was christened "San Ignacio," a name presumably chosen by the Jesuits and not by the Guarani.

  Were the expeditions dangerous? Probably. Torres reported to Rome that one team worked in a region menaced by savages "so cruel that they devour those slain in battle and make flutes of their shinbones and mugs from the skulls."20 Still, everything is relative. The Jesuits might well have reasoned that whatever dangers the South American jungles harbored were nothing compared to what they had suffered at the hands of their fellow Europeans. In the more than century-long history of the Guarani missions, twenty-six Jesuits suffered violent deaths; but in only one year, Europeans had massacred exactly twice that many Jesuits. In 1570, a Huguenot corsair had intercepted a ship transporting Jesuits to Brazil. Forty Jesuits were dumped overboard, some beheaded first, others with limbs hacked off. By the end the pirates must have grown bored or simply exhausted by their carnage; they dumped the last few of the forty overboard while they were still alive, leaving them to wade through the blood slick left by their dead and dying colleagues. Maybe it was done for sport, for the amusement of seeing what would happen once the blood in the water attracted nonhuman predators. As it happened, another dozen Jesuits traveling to Brazil over the following year also lost their lives to pirate raiders: fifty-two in all, twice the number that fell working in the reductions.

  Of course, the number of Jesuits savaged by European pirates or Amerindians was miniscule compared to the number of indigenous people killed by Europeans. Torres's colleagues knew the people who needed protection were the Guarani, not the Jesuits themselves. So Torres attempted a strategy that amounted to starting from scratch. He negotiated with the crown to obtain protection for the Guarani settlements from so-called civilized Europeans. The Jesuits settled with the Guarani in newly built cities that were subject directly to the Spanish crown and far removed from the control and influence of Spanish settlements-and from the encomienda system.

  How well did the Jesuits and their Guarani partners do? To be sure, the Jesuit vision was far from perfect. Whatever liberties the reductions afforded the Guarani came within a patronizing system that hardly granted them total human respect and freedom. Still, the Jesuits' visionary, courageous experiment shamed the practices and mindset of their seventeenth-century contemporaries. Histories have heaped praise on the Jesuit effort, the titles alone telling the story: The Lost Paradise and A Vanished Arcadia. Even Voltaire, no great friend of what he called "that stupid power, the [Catholic] church," hailed the reductions as "a triumph of humanity [that] expiates the cruel deeds of the earliest conquerors.

  Musicians, astronomers, and authors: Realizing human potential

  The Tyrolean Antonio Sepp could attest to this triumph of humanity. Sepp had graduated alongside other musical prodigies from the Viennese court school of Les Petits Chanteurs only to choose an unusual career path-as a Jesuit and as maestro of a reduction conservatory. Years after his schooling in Vienna and on an entirely different continent, Sepp reported that his conservatory at Yapeyu de los Reyes had churned out "the following future music masters: six trumpeters, four organists, eighteen cornetists, ten bassoon- ists."21 In one year, that is. Sepp had known more than his share of talented musicians in his youth, so presumably he had some basis for comparison when noting, "The characteristic of [the Guarani's] genius is in general music. There is no instrument whatsoever that they cannot learn to play in a short time. And they do it with the skill and delicacy that one admires in the most gifted masters."22 Perhaps Sepp lacked objectivity. He was their teacher, after all. But Sepp wasn't the only aficionado of Guarani talent, nor was his tutelage the source of their musical genius. Years before Sepp ever set foot in South America, the governor of Buenos Aires had reported to Spain on a musical troupe from Yapeyu, "outstanding in their music and dances as though they had been educated at the court of Your Majesty, and all that in so few years."23

  Buenaventura Suarez also witnessed the triumph of humanity. The great astronomer and mathematician Clavius had envisioned his Jesuit scientific proteges "distributed in various nations and kingdoms like sparkling gems, to the great honour of the Society." It wasn't only his proteges at the astronomical bureau in Beijing who made that vision a reality. A hemisphere away, Suarez, the region's first native-born astronomer, was complementing his Beijing colleagues' work with equally accurate observations of the southern skies. From an observatory planted in the middle of the jungle at the San Cosme reduction, with telescope lenses fashioned from polished crystalline rock, the Jesuit and his Guarani team recorded and traded calculations with astronomers in Sweden, Russia, and China.

  But perhaps those who could testify most eloquently to the triumph of humanity are those Guarani who for the first time in their long history had their own written language with which to do so. Long before Buenos Aires boasted a printing office, the Austrian Jesuit J. B. Neumann constructed the first printing press in the Rio de la Plata regi
on out of wooden frames and tin type. But before Neumann could shape his tin letters, someone had to shape the language. The Creole Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya reduced dozens of disparate dialects into a standard, unified Guarani language. It became the basis of one of the very few indigenous languages today to be formally recognized as a national language in Latin America. Nicolas Yapuguay's Guarani sermons and commentaries made him only the most famous of various published Guarani authors.

  The product of love: Realizing human potential

  Shown here are examples of the art and architecture created by Guarani Indians of the Paraguay reductions. With the Jesuit expulsion from South America, most of these settlements were abandoned and fell into decay. Ruins and artifacts give eloquent if silent testimony to the unparalleled achievements of the Guarani craftspeople and their Jesuit collaborators.

  Of course, people do not live on music, science, and literature alone. Guarani craftspeople found time to fashion musical instruments and observatory equipment only after siting, surveying, engineering, and building their reductions. More than thirty reductions housed more than a hundred thousand Guarani across a broad swath of modern Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. Each reduction accommodated up to a thousand families and the two Jesuits who served them. Interaction with the colonials had brought little good to the Guarani, so Torres had instructed his teams to "with courage, prudence and tact prevent [colonials] entering the reduction."24 As a result the Guarani made their towns as completely self-supporting as possible.

  Letters home from Sepp, the conservatory maestro, described vibrant, fully functioning, self-contained communities: "After the sick I visit the offices: first the school, where the boys are instructed in reading and writing.-.-.-. I also visit my musicians, singers, trumpets, hautboys, etc. On certain days I instruct some Indians in dancing.-.-.-. After that I go among the workmen, to the brick makers and tile-makers, the bakers, smiths, joiners, carpenters, painters, and above all the butchers who kill fifteen or sixteen oxen a day."25

  Sepp the priest, counselor, music teacher-and dance teacher? Is there anything the reductions Jesuits didn't do? Not really, it seems: a Czech Jesuit's reduction memoirs explained how to cope with jaguar encounters: "Direct [a stream of urine] into the eyes of a tiger threatening you at the foot of a tree and you are safe: the beast will immediately take to flight." 26 Presumably he was relating local folk wisdom rather than personal experience-but who knows.

  Unfortunately, the Jesuits discovered no such deterrent for the Guaranf's most virulent predators-the colonists. For whether the Jesuits did indeed create a utopia, it was smack in the middle of what would become a living hell. Voltaire's generous assessment that the reductions somehow expiated "the cruel deeds of the earliest conquerors" was a bit naive. The earliest conquerors were long dead when the first reduction opened, but the cruel deeds were yet to shift into high gear.

  It was the Jesuits themselves who unwittingly helped set the table for the worst of those cruel deeds. Across the ill-defined border established by the Treaty of Tordesillas, in Portuguese territory, teams of Jesuits had been serving Brazil's indigenous people with the same visionary commitment as that of their colleagues on the reductions. The year 1570 proved a particularly bittersweet one for these Jesuits in Brazil: the awful massacre of their forty seaborne colleagues by French pirates had come in the same year as a bold legislative coup. Jesuits lobbying against the mistreatment of Indians in Brazil had moved King Sebastian of Portugal to outlaw virtually all enslavement of the colony's indigenous people. He entrusted welfare of the native people to the Jesuits, who had already begun creating landed communities, aldeias, to house and employ them; going forward, plantation owners would have to pay for indigenous labor by negotiating wages through each aldeia's managers.

  It was a stunningly unpopular decree. Sugar cane cultivation had allowed long-suffering Brazilian settlers to finally glimpse some hint of prosperity. The king's edict now threatened the engine of that prosperity, the slave labor that made the business profitable. It had been challenging enough to maintain an adequate slave labor force even before the royal decree. Native populations all across the Americas were perishing under the onslaught of imported European diseases. According to one estimate, for example, the Peruvian population dropped from three million to slightly more than one million in only sixty years (1520-80). There were similar, if not so drastic, stories about populations all over the continent. Free labor was already dying (literally), and now King Sebastian was ruling Brazil's indigenous people off limits.

  Decades later, however, an unanticipated, far more convenient labor source fell into the plantation owners' laps. What the Brazil Jesuits had snatched away from the slave owners, the Paraguay Jesuits now seemed to dangle in front of them. Bandeirantes (slave raiders) from Sao Paolo had long hunted Guarani tribes in the Spanish territory east of the Parana River. It was unrewarding work, hacking deep into unfamiliar terrain in search of nomadic tribespeople to take into slavery. But thanks to the success of the reductions, in the early 1600s the bandeirantes stumbled upon thousands of Guarani in settled communities within a hundred miles of Sao Paolo. The Jesuit vision of self-sufficient Guarani communities had overlooked a key ingredient: defense.

  An awful irony slowly unfolded. The Brazil Jesuits' success in protecting local indigenous groups from slavery had only fueled the search for slaves farther afield: in Africa and in South America's Spanish colonies. And the Paraguay Jesuits' efforts to liberate and settle the Guarani had increased the Guarani's vulnerability to bandeirante raids. The good fathers had unwittingly made the Guarani sitting ducks for slave hunters swooping down from Sao Paolo. Between 1628 and 1631, more than sixty thousand Guarani were captured and sold in Brazilian slave markets. Thousands more were killed during slave raids or forced marches, and just as many died during the Jesuits' hurriedly organized forced evacuations from reductions bordering Portuguese territory.

  No help came from the Spanish colonial administration in Asuncion. What was to be gained by protecting the Guarani? The Jesuits had released and shielded them from encomienda. The Guarani towns traded little with the colonials, indeed competed with them in yerba mate export trade. The only possible support was across an ocean: the Spanish king and the pope. And it wasn't as if the Jesuits could fax Europe requesting a cease and desist order. Years passed before reductions Jesuits reached Europe to plead the Guarani case. For Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, the South American-born compiler of the first Guarani dictionary and grammar, his European odyssey on behalf of the Guarani was no boondoggle. He wrote morosely to colleagues back in South America, "Not for me all this bustle, hand-kissing, courtesies, waste of time, and especially having my mind occupied with business, anxieties, and projects, which rarely come to anything. In sum, Father mine, I remain here an exile. Not a day goes by but for my consolation I imagine they are already taking me to the ship [to return to South America]."27

  Depressed or not, the Jesuit envoys achieved their objective with the assistance of well-connected European colleagues who helped them navigate diplomatic Rome and the Spanish court. The papal bull Commissum Nobis recounted the brutal treatment of the Guaranf before commanding the Portuguese procurator general to "severely prohibit anyone from reducing to slavery, selling, buying, exchanging, giving away, separating from wives and children, depriving of their property, taking away to other places, depriving of liberty in any way and keeping in servitude said Indians."28

  Not that anyone in Sao Paolo had the slightest intention of abandoning slaving.

  Promulgation of the papal bull in Sao Paolo elicited no remorse or compliance, only demands to oust the meddlesome Jesuits. They had wreaked havoc through King Sebastian's 1570 decree, outlawing enslavement of indigenous people native to Portugal's Brazilian territory, and now the Jesuits had compounded that offense by inducing the pope to declare indigenous groups in Spanish territory off-limits to Portuguese slave traders as well. Jesuit houses in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo were
attacked by outraged colonials. As Brazilian settlers ignored the papal decree, it seemed Jesuit diplomacy had succeeded mostly in angering the colonial slaveholders and in whipping slave fever into an unprecedented frenzy. Less than a year after the bull's publication in Sao Paolo, a huge slaving party of five hundred bandeirantes and three thousand Tupi Indian warrior allies sailed toward Guarani territory in a flotilla of hundreds of boats.

  When love meant war

  In retrospect, the raid of the bandeirantes proved Jesuit diplomacy spectacularly effective, albeit not quite in the way that the pope, king, or Jesuit diplomats themselves had envisioned. For this time, it was not the Guarani but their enemies who were the sitting ducks. Absent the papal incitement, it's unlikely the bandeirantes would ever have mounted so massive a raiding party as the one that furiously paddled down the Uruguay River toward Guarani lands-and into a waiting ambush. The Jesuit emissaries in Europe hadn't been the only Jesuits at work. Back in the reductions, their colleagues hadn't waited for royal permission before arming the Guaranf. The legacy of military men turned Jesuits hadn't ended with Loyola and Goes: Jesuit and ex-soldier Domingo Torres brushed up on long-dormant skills to help redress the one missing element of Guarani self-sufficiency. His Guarani militia destroyed the slaving party during the weeklong battle of Mborore.

  If the Jesuits and the Guarani had fashioned a utopia with their reductions, from this battle forward the communities bore the very nonutopian marks of civilization elsewhere. Guarani militias went into battle at least fifty times over the following decades while struggling to defend their way of life. They regularly beat back incursions by slave raiders and hostile neighboring tribes. But frequently they were called into battle by a Spanish colonial government that at last appreciated the Guarani-though perhaps cynically-as an effective buffer against Portuguese forays onto Spanish territory.