Sergio's Journey Part 3
fish along the ponds? borders, not far from Brecheret?s heavy yet beautiful monument to the Paulista Bandeirantes. Raposo could well be imagined as the sculpture?s leading mounted figure, stamping on the ground and with a heavy Toledan sword of stone down his booted leg. The cool air of July did not help to bring out the best of people?s exuberance there in Ibirapuera, but the mild winter was not even close to quenching merriment and sports in its cafés and lawns.
After Ibirapuera, later in the evening, we went to join Rony and his family for a mild night out. We had met him in the restaurant across our hotel ? the Sopa Paulista in the city centre ? where he served us our meals with the warmth of his conversation. I learned that he came from Canudos, the already legendary place in the Bahian sertão where one of the most dramatic episodes in Brazilian history took place back in 1897. We had befriended a descendant of the peasants ? or jagunzos ? who had put the Brazilian Republic to shame shortly after its outset, only to be crushed later by it in the wrath of its offended pride. A story of epic proportions told in Euclydes da Cunha?s book Os Sertões and retold by Vargas Llosa in The War of the End of the World. Seven years ago, Rony came to São Paulo from Nova Canudos, along with honey-eyed Loreta, his modern jagunza companion. Five years later they had Carolina, a new Paulistana of sertanejo stock. The last century has been the time for the sertão to come to São Paulo, after the village of centuries past had spent its earlier times in trying to tame it.
Raposo did not take all his men with him when he left the village of São Paulo early in the year of 1648 (some accounts say that he left late in 1647; it is not too relevant for our project). His second in command, Antonio Pereyra de Azevedo took with him 80 Portuguese and an undefined number of Tupis ? no less than 500 or 600 at any rate ? and headed southeast. His destination was the missions of Itatim, where he was to supplement by raiding the modest provisions gathered by the expedition in São Paulo. Raposo, on the other hand, led 120 Portuguese men and 1200 Tupis northeast, towards the mountain of San Fernando, in the swamps of the upper Paraguay River. His intention appears to have been to attack the mission of father Lupercio Zurbano, the northernmost of the Jesuit reductions, but it did not exist any longer in 1648, as Raposo was to learn. As for Pereyra, he was to loot in Itatim and meet Raposo in San Fernando so that the whole expedition could spend together the period of high waters in the upper Paraguay swamps, between November and March. A critical fact was the absence of priests in the expedition, and therefore of a chronicler. Father Antonio Vieira would complain bitterly about this most unusual procedure in a letter he wrote in 1654 describing the expedition in detail ? as I will show further ahead. The absence of a scribe among Raposo?s men can be understood as yet another aspect of the expedition?s secrecy and possibly of the determination of the Portuguese Crown to carry on this undertaking without the interference of the Church. On the other hand and by the same token, it played a part in the obscurity in which the enterprise has remained down the centuries, together with other factors to which I will also come later.
				IN THE LAND OF THE GUARANIES
It was no small pleasure to find out that the highway out of São Paulo leading towards Campo Grande and Corumbá ? in the State of Matto Grosso ? (the SP280), bears the name Rodovia Antonio Raposo Tavares. The one leading straight West (the SP270) and the one that branches south towards the Iguazu Falls (the BR369), bare no names but those numbers. As we will show later, Antonio de Pereyra was honoured for his exploits in a more concrete way, if not as enduring. We followed Pereyra?s route, determined, as we were to follow the two sides of the branching expedition; from Paraguay we would go north to join the ghosts of Raposo?s party in the Pantanal.
We did not know at the time that much of the territory West of São Paulo, as near as 300 miles away from the city, had once been claimed by Spanish Jesuit missionaries. Indeed, the very first of their aldeais, San Loreto and San Ignacio, had been erected on the Paranapanema River, east of the Parana. This was then Tupi-Guaraní land, still unclaimed by Paulistas or by Spanish settlers from Paraguay, and mainly for the sake of keeping the reduced Indians away from the latter; the priests had crossed the Parana. These were to be the first Spanish Jesuit lands to be taken by the Paulista raiders and turned Portuguese. The Paulista claim would eventually extend to all the other missions east of the Parana and north of the Uruguay rivers.
The town of São Paulo itself was founded in 1553 by Portuguese Jesuits moving in from the coastal town of São Vicente, modern-day Santos. They put their school near the first foundation of São André, carried out by a Portuguese forerunner who befriended the Goyanaze Indians, and in the end it would be the Jesuit foundation that proved most enduring. Therefore, the Iberian history of the whole of today?s Brazilian South and up to São Paulo?s Paraibá Valley, started off as a Jesuit enterprise, and the major part of it was Spanish. It was the raiding carried out by the Paulista Indian hunters that would dislodge Spanish settlement in that region. This was precisely the stretch of land ? from East to West ? which we crossed overnight by bus from São Paulo to the border town of Foz de Iguaçú. It comprised what was once called the missions province of Guairá, wrested from the Spanish Jesuits as early as 1632. Across the river Paraná laid the missions of Itatim, raided by Raposo and other Paulistas, destroyed repeatedly but never ultimately taken from Spanish rule. They would come to constitute the richest part of the modern State of Paraguay.
The Iguazu Falls lie just a few miles up the river by the same, before it flows into the Paraná. Moreover, a tongue of Argentinean land protrudes from the south all the way to the Iguazu River, so that the falls are shared by Argentina and Brazil and not at all by Paraguay. This is another consequence of the intricacies of the historical formation of the nations along the basin of La Plata, a notion that includes the basins of the Paraná, the Uruguay and the Paraguay rivers. Raposo?s raidings and his ultimate expedition are but more in a great number of events in this complex process. This is where the Southern Cone begins, where Portuguese and Spanish America first met and eventually reached a complex equilibrium. The flowing of the Iguazu into the
Paraná is today the tourist-crowded Meeting of Three Countries. More than that, it is the point where the pendulum of the two Iberian empires in America stopped its swing at last.
Today, the Iguazu Falls lie at the heart of a frontier land. Arriving in them takes long hours and it implies moving away from centres of population. Notwithstanding its remoteness, different reasons have attracted travellers to this land for more than four centuries. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca first came this way in 1542, on his way to Paraguay, after having landed prematurely in Santa Catarina Island (where modern Florianopolis is) instead of following the customary way through Buenos Aires and up the La Plata River. He chose to do this only to explore the shorter land bridge. In doing so, he discovered the Iguazu Falls, crossed the Paraná and arrived in Asunción. He then went north to the upper Paraguay river, into the flooding plains where Raposo was to camp for six months a century later ? but to this I will come back to it in due time. Nowadays, the reasons for going to the frontier land of Iguazu are the Falls themselves and the natural beauty of the surrounding region. This was the heartland of the Guaraní ? surely sacred to them ? and by the seventeenth century it had become the centre around which the Jesuit missionary effort was to unfold.
Raposo had raided the Jesuit missions on the three sides of this river merging. He had done the Guairá Missions repeatedly between 1629 and 1632, to the point that he and his fellow Paulistas caused their definite removal to the other side of the Paraná; then the Tape Missions ? further south, in modern Uruguay ? in 1636; finally, in the 1648 expedition, his second in command, Pereyra, raided Itatim, across the Paraná. He had done it with such efficiency ? it is estimated that his entradas alone took over 10000 Indians to the slave markets of Rio de Janeiro ? that he was customarily called The Infamous by Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits alike. His actions had been systematic throughout a whole decade, and while they indirectly benefited the Portuguese Crown, they threatened the essence of the Iberian Catholic Monarchy in America. His attacks against the priests and his outright destruction of the Jesuit missionary effort were embarrassingly at odds with the ideological foundation of Iberian governance over the Native American peoples. Moreover, the Portuguese presence south of Rio de Janeiro was very scanty and for the time being it did not warrant such serious political compromise. This explains why the Paulista entradas where for the most part a private business, to which the Portuguese Crown closed an eye. Only gold or silver mines would commit the Crown, but they were to be sought further north. After all, no El Dorado had ruled over Guaraní lands.
It is quite likely that Raposo had come to see the Iguazu Falls at some point during his three-year raiding of the Guairá missions, back between 1629 and 1632. He spent a long time in the region and was very close to a natural wonder that, then as much as today, must have been awe-inspiring and talking matter for conquistadors and sertanistas across the whole continent. For us, the falls were the majestic gate to a Guaraní world that keeps alive even after it has been dismembered. In Paraguay, the majority of the people ? even the whites and the mestizos ? speak Guaraní. It is a language of the Tupí-Guaraní family, which once extended from the lowlands of modern Bolivia to the whole length of the Brazilian coast. A mixture of Tupí-Guaraní languages and Portuguese ? called Lingua Geral ?, was spoken in the Brazilian
southern outback well into the twentieth century; traces of it survive today all over the region. This shows that the Iguazu frontier was a borderline between sibling peoples and that the modern South of Brazil and Paraguay share a deep historical affinity, even if hard to see after the wake of nationalistic constructions has done its work.
Raposo must have spoken Lingua Geral, as certainly did the mestizo Paulistas who came with his expedition and with Pereyra?s column. This throws the rather macabre result that enslavers and slaves could communicate fluently. The otherness of the victims was manifest in many traits but it was blurred by many others. This was a new land for the Paulistas simply in the sense that they were still fighting for it, but it had been the scene of their activities for over a hundred years, as it had been of the Spanish conquistadors and the Jesuit missionaries. The game of life and death Raposo was playing with his enemies and his victims was, by 1648, an old one. In the southernmost part of the 1648 expedition, he and Pereyra could not veil their actions with the mantle of the exploratory, the evangeliser or the Crown strategist. By that time and in that region, the Paulistas were devoid of any of the candour attributed to forerunners like Columbus or of any high motivations, and Pereyra?s detour beyond Iguazu and the Paraná was nothing but looting for provisions. Further north, even if equally military in its nature, the expedition would have a different logic.
Antonio de Pereyra crossed the Paraná River in the winter of 1648 (that is, by July or August) and by the end of October had advanced into the missionary province of Itatim, already in modern Paraguay. He attacked the aldeia on the banks of the river Mboymboy on November the first, where he met strong Guarani resistance led by father Alonso Arias. The priest was killed in the engagement, the Indians dispersed and the Paulistas took their booty and destroyed the aldeia as was their custom. The fact that Pereyra chose this northerly Jesuit enclave suggests that he was moving towards his commander, who awaited him in the upper Paraguay. Having killed a priest, moreover, Pereyra had one more reason to shorten the duration of his business in Spanish domains, and he headed north along the river to meet Raposo at the feet of the mountain of San Fernando.
At the Falls of Iguazu, the diffraction of light through the countless curtains of water produces small rainbows, whose origins are easily discernible both in the water and on rocks and trees. We knew, however, that there was no pot of gold buried in them, as Cabeza de Vaca had made clear to any future explorers in his Comentarios. Thanks to this intimation into conquistador lore, we could postpone in our hearts any existing drives for gain or glory, and were ready to indulge in the contemplation of the sheer beauty of the cataracts. We spent the whole day strolling up and down the bold catwalks that have been built on the Argentinean side of the river, some of which almost plunge under the curtains of white water and afford a sustained feeling of awe under one of the world?s most renown natural wonders. Wet and with an overflowing feeling of fulfilment we headed back into Brazil. Our senses had been cleansed by the roaring beauty of the cascading Iguazu. We were now ready to move on to the Jesuit reductions of Paraguay, where the half-standing walls and perfectly discernible plans of the abandoned aldeias still bear witness to the ancient toils of the Pope?s soldiers.
We entered ancient Itatim through its modern gate on the Brazilian border. Ciudad del Este serves this purpose well, as a trading enclave placed on a number of crossroads. Here we learnt of the most efficient way to cross borders in this part of the world: a taxi ride from side to side of the bridge, via the two countries? checking points. This makes a complicated travelling procedure much simpler, while allowing time for conversation with street-wise and bicultural taxi drivers. Bernardo, a native of the southernmost Brazilian State of Rio Grande do Sul, gave us another inkling into the nature of the frontier region we were then travelling, which back in time had been a continuous cultural complex but was now dissected by different polities and unequal economies. He was born in Porto Alegre, brought up by his grandmother in the Argentinean province of Misiones and now makes his living between Foz de Iguaçu in Brazil and Ciudad del Este in Paraguay. He told us that as a child his Spanish was that of a natural speaker, but that he had lost it and now had no choice but to speak ?Portuñol? to his Paraguayan customers, that utterly spontaneous mixture of the two languages spoken by frontier people. He saw this as a loss, unlike most people ? us included ? who were happy and even proud of being able to communicate in what we all tend to regard as a reasonable version of either Portuguese or Spanish, when in most cases it is just a very personal concoction.
We had no shopping to do in Ciudad del Este, so we moved on towards Encarnación, in the heart of the old missionary province of Itatim. On the way we came into acquaintance with the Eastern Paraguayan landscape of subtropical savannahs in winter. A deep-blue sky dotted with sporadic sheets of ripped clouds ? attesting to the cold air ? crowned deep-green savannahs with scattered patches of semi-tropical forests. In these, leafless skeletons of tall trees emerged from a thick canopy of evergreens ? not pines, but a varied array of tropical-looking trees.
Interspersed in that landscape were the rural communities of Eastern Paraguay. Well-laid-out and smooth dirt roads depart at right angles from the highway. Their intense red colour contrasts with the deep green of the savannah and the cobalt blue of the sky, in a way reminiscent of expressionistic painting. Hampsteads are laid out along these red roads. Most houses are wooden, some made of brick, and they all are painted in some bright colour, the most common being light blue. They are small and one-storied, and a small shack is placed nearby giving the impression of a dollhouse. Every single house has a volleyball court right in the front lawn. It was fortunate that we travelled through modern Itatim on a Sunday: the volley-ball courts were all filled with players of all ages and the houses? doors were all open in spite of the cold to let people, food and drinks in and out.
Later in Asunción we were to learn how deep the present Paraguayan economic crisis is. People are leaving the main cities, trade and industry and are going back to the countryside and agriculture. It is the hampsteads we saw ? were friends and relatives help in the transition ? that take them in. The rural side of the country endures most in times of crisis, a fact not as obvious as it may sound. It may be that agriculture is generally more resilient than trade and industry, but if the social foundations of the first are not strong it collapses together with the other two, or simply after urbanization has occurred in a sufficiently large scale. This has happened in countries like Colombia, where violence has set in an abandoned countryside and nothing seems to be able to stop it.
Thinking about the Paraguayan hampsteads ? and particularly in response to the omnipresent volleyball courts ?; I wondered what kept those rural communities so vibrant and ever capable of a form of institutionalised joie de vivre. To me, those volleyball courts meant no less than a sign of a rural culture capable and determined to withstand crisis. No such drives are to be seen in Asunción these days, were shops and venues are shutting down and the streets are deserted for most part of the day. Perhaps the resilience of the Paraguayan countryside can be understood as the persistence of the old Guarani civilization. Perhaps land use, land distribution and the culture of a rural society in modern Paraguay benefit from old legacies. But, how could we tell from the passing bus?
It has been customary within a certain historiographic tradition to explain modern Paraguay as the result of the actions and tribulations of the Jesuit order ever since the XVI century. The missionaries reduced the rural-dwelling Guarani Indians to a pattern of town habitation, the aldeias; then came the onslaughts against the Order, first by Spanish settlers and Paulista raiders, later by the Iberian Crowns and finally by Republican patriots. When this historiographic approach is carried to its ultimate consequences, modern Paraguay is seen as a series of doomed attempts at modernization carried out at the expense of the Jesuits and their worldview, heroic actions and devoted zeal. On the other hand, the opposing historical school would have it that modernization required the dismantling of the Jesuit missionary system and - if taken to its un-stated consequences ? that the whole Guarani Civilization needed to be put aside in the making of a modern republic of citizens. The Enlightenment was to do without it, even if that meant that a whole people were to be born again.
But we did not see standing aldeias when we crossed present-day Itatim, only rural hamsteads well populated, well kept, painted in bright colours and endowed with an infrastructure for enjoyment. And we heard of thousands fleeing the sinking boat of modernization in the hope that it will come back afloat when remote stock markets swing back to their prime after yet another periodical shrinking. Those who flee come to the hamsteads, and these are still Guaraní hamsteads. Guaraní is spoken there; land use goes back far beyond the XVI century in these subtropical savannahs. Rural life in this land antedated Spanish conquistadors, Paulista raiders, Jesuit missionaries and creole patriots, both in the garments of liberating soldiers or enlightened lawyers.
Of course, Volleyball was no Guaraní invention. Some would see it as yet another instance of cultural dependency, unaware of the fact that among the Guaranís cultural exchange is rich both ways. Late German and Eastern European settlers speak the local language, live rural lives and dress like Paraguayan peasants ? which by the way is not typical at all. My guess is that volleyball came ultimately from Brazil, across that modern frontier that today separates what in pre-Iberian times was a cultural continuity. It is not in the game itself where the persistence of a Guaraní civilization is to be seen, but in the cultural capital that gives a whole people the determination and the imagination necessary to warrant enjoyment in the midst of acute crisis.
Our crossing of eastern Itatim took us to Encarnación, a town on the Parana River opposite the Argentinean city of Posadas. Just as Ciudad del Este, Encarnación is a trade enclave, but here exchange occurs with Argentina. Not even here, despite the acute Argentinean crisis, was the Paraguayan one too apparent. It is true that the street market near the river - from where the skyline of Posadas rises not too far - was rather empty and that the Argentinean accent was not to be heard among the shops. Our accents were strange to the vendors, but they seemed to announce buying power just as much. It was not the case, which came as a surprise; for them, the lower prices of CD players and brand blue jeans seem to be the natural reason for foreigners to come to the town. Instead of the flashy commodities of a ?globalised? economy, we came to town to take a look at the ancient Jesuit mission of Trinidad. They lie some 30 kilometres away from the town, and a bus ride is necessary.
The mission of La Santísima Trinidad, unlike its earlier counterparts, enjoyed peace. Its construction started in 1704, when the prime of the Paulista raids was past, and it endured until 1767, when the Jesuit Order was banned by the Pope. What brought it to an end was the high politics of the Bourbon kings of France and Spain, and the unwilling acquiescence of a weak Pope. Trinidad was never pillaged nor set on fire by Paulistas or Spanish bandits, and instead it has deteriorated slowly in time, as people used its stones to build their houses. This process of conversion was halted by the Paraguayan government and UNESCO when the site was declared Patrimony of Humanity and enclosed as an open-air museum. We strolled leisurely in its green streets of mown grass and among its red stone buildings. The colours of the mission reproduce those of the surrounding landscape. Its buildings rise on a slight promontory thus commanding a view across the subtropical savannah.
A tower, a church, a cathedral, the lodgings of priests and Indians; these buildings still stand. The others can be imagined from their foundations on the ground: the school for the Guarani, the factory. They all surround an ample rectangular plaza where the daily routine gatherings of Jesuits and Indians took place. We did not see any sign of fortification around the complex of buildings, a trait that could not have been absent in a mission built fifty years before.  The cathedral alone makes for quite a sight. To me, a student at Warwick University and an inhabitant of Coventry for over two years, it reminded me of the ruins of the city?s old cathedral. The size of both plans is more or less the same; in both cases heavy blocks of stone are sculpted into columns, corners, windowsills, statues, altars. On the other hand, one can immediately tell that the processes of destruction undergone by both buildings were radically different. The gothic cathedral took the blows from the air, while the Jesuit one appear to have taken them through the main door, so that only the apse ? behind the altar ? still rises to its full height. The altar is thus surrounded by a towering shell of red masonry, unlike the nave, which has been stripped of its walls. Statues of Saint Ignatius still line the length of the nave up to the altar, their faces disfigured by exposure to the elements, not by vandalism or the zeal of a different faith. Unfortunately, only the foundations of the school remain. One wonders if the stones of these buildings were the first to be taken for the construction of nearby houses because the people around the mission thought of this building as closest to them.
In 1534 Pedro de Mendoza, a nobleman from Cadiz, had set out from Seville with the largest fleet so far sent to America and the title of Adelantado. His deal with the Spanish Crown was to take possession of all the lands south of the river Plata and to govern the new settlements to be founded there. One of Mendoza?s first deeds was the founding of Buenos Aires, but hunger and shifty relations with the local Quirimbies made the town?s future uncertain. He sailed up the river Plata, which had been explored by Sebastian Cabot eight years later. A detachment of Mendoza?s force went up the Uruguay River, but one of its ships hit shoals and the rest realized that the river led towards the northeast, where the Portuguese colony of San Vicente was already well established. Therefore, Medoza chose to explore the Paraguay, river, and for this he sent Juan de Ayola. In 1536 the ships under his command went up the Paraguay River and met the agricultural Cario Indians, four leagues up the point where the Paraguay receives the waters of the Pilcomayo. The Spaniards engaged in battle with the Carios and subdued them after a fierce battle. Once peace had been settled with the Indian chieftains? promise to obey the Spaniards in all things, Ayola proceeded to the foundation of the city of Asunción. Over the next decades, it proved to be a much more stable foundation than Buenos Aires, and soon after the conquest of the Incas in Peru, it became a strategic enclave in the Spanish efforts to link the basin of the Plata to the Andes. In the following century, Asunción was to become also the port of call and the base from which Spanish settlers were to launch expeditions up the Paraguay River into the swamps of the Xaraes (present day Matto Grosso), towards the Parana River and west into Bolivia. The Jesuit missions were to be built east of the city, as secluded as possible from the ambition of those Spanish settlers and their determination to use the Indians as free labour.
We entered the city on a Monday afternoon and were immediately struck by the emptiness of its streets. The city?s rhythm was strangely low, many shops were closed or on sale and pedestrians looked without looking. We thought for a while that it may all be due to it being time for siesta, but it was not. The old aristocratic city of Ayola and his hidalgos, was taking the highest toll of the national crisis. A crisis that is not economic ? and as such related to the crash of the Argentinean economy ? but profoundly political. The owner of the pensión where we stayed told us not to leave the house in the night, as motorised bands of criminals have taken control of the city and operate as they please in the small hours. He spoke with nostalgia of the days when the dictator Stroessner governed the country and of a giant German friend more the seven feet tall who was his personal friend and shared in the inner circle of the dictator.  Next day, we saw protesters picketing silently in front of the National Assembly for the uncounted missing persons fallen victim to the long dictatorship.  They do this after eleven years of elected governments.