In the year of the Lord 1607 two colonies were founded in the Americas. One was Jamestown, the first surviving English colony in North America. The other was the start of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay, though the first mission, San Ignacio Guanzu, didn’t get off the ground until 1609. The Jesuit missions, called Reductions, lasted 160 years, and were governed independently from the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South America. To those missions I turn my attention.
Ideological Foundations of the Paraguay Reductions
The Reductions owe an ideological debt to Utopian socialist ideas common in the 16th century. Books such as Thomas Moore’s Utopia described such ideal societies, where greed didn’t exist because material possessions were kept in common. These ideas were widely popular among idealistic reformers of the era; for example, the famed Dominican Father las Casas wanted to form socialistic Indian communities in today’s Venezuela.
A second inspiration for the Paraguayan Reductions was the social organization of the Inca Empire. The priest who came up with the idea of the Reductions consciously copied the centralized organization of the Inca Empire—to him the extreme control Incas exerted over their subjects was a good thing. Thus, deciding which crops to plant, when to harvest, how many hours to work and so on, would be decided by the leaders of the community; in the Paraguay Reductions, that would be the Jesuit fathers.
But the biggest inspiration for life in the Reductions was the monastic life; the Reductions would be organized like monastic communities, but with families living in them instead of monks or nuns. This regimentation of life and communal living was well-known to the Jesuit fathers who wrestled with the challenges of life in the South American wilderness.
Social and Economic Life
The Reductions were, to put it bluntly, fortified towns governed by two Jesuit missionaries. Their main attraction to the Guarani Indians who came to live in them was physical protection from enslaving raiding parties. (More on that later). The older Jesuit would concern himself with the spiritual health of “his” Indians, while the younger one would concern himself with the daily life of the community. On all matters, in theory at least, Jesuit authority was final.
That included, of course, agriculture. The Guarani Indians were semi-nomad, and thus not used to the hard labor of intensive agriculture. They hated the new life. (And who could blame them). But they accepted the economic organization imposed by the Jesuit fathers.
The Jesuits started by refusing to recognize land as property—all agricultural land was the ‘property’ of the community. The fathers divided the land into two types; land cultivated in common, and land cultivated individually. To get anything out of the land cultivated in common, the fathers had to rely on punishment, use informants to find out ‘shirkers’, and similar stratagems to get the Guarani Indians to work at all. This was my initial motivation to write about the Paraguay Reductions—I experienced the same system of informants as a Cuban teenager.
The land cultivated individually was even worse—the Indians would work those lands as little as possible, or not at all. People familiar with Socialist agriculture would be surprised by this fact—why wouldn’t the Indians work their ‘own’ land? Here your expectations would betray you; the plots of land cultivated by Indian households were NOT private or semi-private property. All of the fruits of the land were socialized, so the reluctant Guarani farmers would work badly when spied upon, and refused to work when no one was informing on them.
Spanish Settlers and Paulista Raiders
Why did the Guarani Indians accept life in the Reductions, if they hated that life? The main reason was simple: avoiding slavery. Spanish settlers in today’s Argentina and Uruguay would occasionally organize raiding parties to enslave Guaranis. An even larger challenge was that of the Paulista raiders, a sort of land-based pirate society based on today’s Brazilian state of Sao Paulo. The Jesuit fathers acted as advocates of the Indians in the Spanish and Portuguese courts, offering some protection that way. But what really stopped raids from the Spanish colonists and greatly curtailed the Paulista raids was the arming and training of the Guaranis into militias. The Jesuits hated to arm the Indians—they were big proto gun controllers—but eventually gave in to reality and taught Guarani men how to fight.
The training policy was an enormous success. The Jesuits, without seeking such a state of affairs, had trained, in a matter of years, the strongest military force in South America. That made the Spanish and Portuguese settlers nervous, and they began plotting against the order. Eventually the political maneuvers bore fruit, and the Jesuits were thrown out of South America in 1767. The order was suppressed six years later.
What do I take from the rise and downfall of the Jesuit State of Paraguay? Well, for one, it is a great story. The founding of 30 socialist towns in an enormous area in South America is a story well worth repeating. But as a 21st century conservative, two facts bring a smile to my face: for over 150 years, collective ownership of land resulted in misery and poverty, while the policy of arming and training the population resulted in a resounding success.
