Text extracted from The Jesuits Empire published in 1904

By Leopoldo Lugones

Leopoldo Lugones was born in Córdoba in 1874 and died near Buenos Aires in 1938. He was an outstanding writer, very recognized in his time and nowadays, he called this book an historic essay, and as such is an exception in his work..

By calling the Missions an Empire the author unveils his lack of sympathty to jesuits´s work. He finsihed the book concluding that the best evidence of Jesuits´failing was the fact that Missions couldn´t survive after Jesuits´ expulsion. I respect very much Leopoldo Lugones´works, yet from his book I learned that without Jesuits indians became very exposed, that they got involved in wars of countries which were foreign for them, even worst it seems that they have been used. They kept on with the comunitarian system as much as they could but we can´t blame Jesuit´s for not preparing indians for ruling themselves, how could they have forseen such a sudden expulsion and that some years later the Pope himself would close down their entire order. Until their expulsion Jesuits had been somehow the knowledge provider in the colony, his abscense had to be shocking not only for indians. How to train achitects, lawyers, physicians? did guaraní indians want to travel to so distant universities?. And what about training leaders and made them be respected by colonial authorities. It was not a short term task.

Reading the book I remembered a jesuit priest speaking about the annual reports submitted to Rome by all the Missions, he said that it was necessary to compile and classifiy all this material since it was packed almost unlabeled... So the history was written looking the missions from the outside, from Spanish files, Argentine files and so on, but Jesuit files have been ignored throughout all this time... is amazing!

The missions deserve more social research than historic research, they had a population of more than 100.000 indians, free to come back to the forest if they wanted to. They lived in a very tough comunitarian system, to the extreme of not using any kind of money. They lasted 150 years under Jesuits and in many cases more than 50 years after Jesuits´expulsion keeping on with the comunitarian system, many could had lasted more if they hadn´t got involved by sorrounding wars among Portuguese Brasil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina. Which was the break even point between European culture and indian culture found by jesuits and indians?. The missions were outstanding in many ways, for example, the first printing machine manufactured in all South America was made by those indians in the forest, this printing machine was the only one existing in this part of the world for many years.