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from exploiting the Indian population for labor and concubines. In the
absence of Spanish women, sexual license became quite ingrained in
this isolated setting. Here the mestizo elite jealously preserved its domi-
nation over the Indians with little interference from the colonial state,
reason enough that the Jesuits came to be resented in Paraguay.
Having arrived at the end of the 16th century, the missionaries of
the Society of Jesus accepted the “heroic” mission of bringing “civiliza-
tion” to the Indians. The citizens of Asunción, however, did not wish
them to take charge of the Guaraní villages close to that city. The Jesuits
went instead into the wilderness regions up the Paraguay and Uruguay
Rivers in territories that today form parts of Argentina and Brazil. In
the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, they brought the Guaraní
into mission villages and taught them the rudiments of Western civi-
lization and religion. More than a few missionaries were martyred for
their efforts.
For the most part, however, the indigenous forest peoples adapted
to the new regime. They built villages and churches, cultivated cassava
and maize, and learned to breed cattle, horses, and pigs. They also took
to learning the catechism in their own language, which they embraced
fervently. The Guaraní headmen were less eager to practice marital
monogamy, but from the mission Indians' standpoint, the bargain was
not entirely negative. The Jesuits did not reduce them to slavery nor
did they convert the women into concubines. Moreover, the missionar-
ies introduced the Indians to crops and farm animals, such as chickens
and cattle, that enriched their diets. Tax rates on the mission Guaraní
remained low, and the Jesuits offered them protection from their indig-
enous enemies, the Paraguayans, and the Brazilian slave hunters.
The main Jesuit settlements lay south of Asunción between the
Paraná and Uruguay Rivers, but the Jesuits also established seven
missions in the present-day Brazilian states of Santa Catarina and Rio
Grande do Sul, raising numerous cattle herds on the prairies. Mainly
in an effort to protect Spanish interests in the Río de la Plata from the
Portuguese in Brazil, the missionaries had turned the mission Indians
into a formidable military force. However, arming the mission Indians
did not sit well with secular residents at Asunción. Nor did the demo-
graphic resurgence of the Guaraní. The Indian population at the mis-
sions reached a nadir at the beginning of the 18th century, by which
point the native population had developed immunities to European
diseases. In 1710, approximately 100,000 Indians inhabited 30 Jesuit
missions, rising to 130,000 by mid-century. In Asunción at about the
same time, the number of Indians serving the Paraguayans reached
