Leaving upon one side their system of administration, and discounting their unalterable perseverance, there were two things on which the Jesuits appealed to the Indians; and those two things, by the very nature of their knowledge of mankind, they knew appealed as much to Indians as to any other race of men. Firstly (and in this writers opposed to them, as Brabo[224] and Azara,[225] both agree), they instilled into the Indians that the land on which they lived, with missions, churches, herds, flocks, and the rest, was their own property. And in the second place they told them they were free, and that they had the King of Spain’s own edict in confirmation of their freedom, so that they never could be slaves. Neither of these two propositions commends itself to many writers on the Jesuits in Paraguay, but for all that it seems to me that in themselves they were sufficient to account for the firm hold the Jesuits had on their neophytes.
The freedom which the Indians enjoyed under the Jesuit rule might not have seemed excessive to modern minds and those attuned to the mild rule of the Europeans of to-day in Africa. Such as it was, it seemed sufficient to the Guaranís, and even, in a limited degree, placed them above the Indians of the Spanish settlements, who for the most part passed their lives in slavery.
Chapter VIII
Don José de Antequera—Appoints himself Governor of Asuncion—Unsettled state of affairs in the town—He is commanded to relinquish his illegal power—He refuses, and resorts to arms—After some success he is defeated and condemned to be executed—He is shot on his way to the scaffold—Renewed hatred against the Jesuits—Their labours among the Indians of the Chaco
From the departure of Cardenas in 1650, to about 1720, was the halcyon period of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay. During that time things went on in the missions after the fashion I have attempted to describe. The people passed their time in their semi-communistic labour, sweetened by constant prayer; their pastors may or may not have done all that was possible to instruct them in the science of the time; but, still, the Indian population did not decrease, as it was observed to do from year to year in other countries of America and in the Spanish settlements in Paraguay.[226] During this period the Jesuits had made repeated efforts, but without much real success, to establish missions amongst the wild equestrian tribes in the Gran Chaco upon the western bank of the river Paraguay. Nothing, apparently, pointed to the events which, beginning in the year 1721, finally led to their expulsion, or, at least, furnished additional reasons to King Charles III. to include the Jesuits in Paraguay in the general expulsion of their order from the dominions of the Spanish crown.
In that year (1721) Don José de Antequera was appointed to succeed the Governor of Paraguay, Don Diego de los Reyes Balmaceda, when his term of office had expired. The situation was, as often happened in the Spanish colonies, complicated by an inquiry into the conduct of the Governor (Balmaceda), in progress at the High Court of Charcas, which court, as in the case of Cardenas, acted most cautiously, both on account of its position, so far from Paraguay, and on account of the inordinate procrastination of everything connected with the Spanish law. If Balmaceda were condemned, then Antequera would step into his shoes at once. If, on the other hand, he were acquitted, Antequera would have to wait until the legal time of office had run its course. So far all was in order, but the High Court, either in doubt of its own wisdom or of its power to pronounce judgment definitely, had issued a decree suspending Balmaceda from his functions, but without either condemning or acquitting him. This, too, they did after having taken more than three years to sift the evidence and summon witnesses, who either had to cross the country on a mule at the imminent risk of death by famine or by Indians, or, having descended the river Plate to Buenos Ayres (which journey often took a month), wait for a ship to take them round Cape Horn to Lima, and from thence travel to Charcas on muleback, following one of the Incas’ roads.
Don José de Antequera y Castro was born at Lima, and being, as Father Charlevoix[227] says, an able, eloquent, but vain and most ambitious man, endowed with plenty of imagination, some talent, and but little ballast, was not content to wait till time should place him in his governorship. So, hearing that a judge inquisitor was to be sent to Paraguay to inquire into the case, and having graduated himself and held the position of procurator fiscal in the Charcas, he solicited the post, and by some error was appointed.
No sooner was the appointment signed than straight he posted off to Paraguay. As he had studied in the college of the Jesuits at La Plata, his first visit was to the reductions of the Jesuits. The missionaries received him well, and sent a troop of Indians to escort him to the boundary of their territories, never suspecting what Antequera was about to do. Having heard that the Governor, Balmaceda, was at a distant port upon the Paraná, Antequera hastened to Asuncion. Arrived there, the same madness of authority seems to have come on him which came fifty or sixty years before his time on Cardenas. Finding no special seat reserved for him in the Cathedral, he publicly reproved the dean, to the great scandal of the worshippers. This seems not to have lost him the respect of the citizens of Asuncion, who were accustomed to all kinds of vagaries, both of their rulers and their spiritual guides. No sort of violence to laws and customs seems ever to affect a people unless the violence is done to benefit them, when instantly they rise against the breaker of the law, however heavily it may bear upon themselves.
But the devoted citizens of Asuncion were so accustomed to perpetual turmoil that, as Dean Funes[228] says, ‘they only stopped when it was absolutely necessary for them to breathe.’ Even the overpraised citizens of Athens at the time of Pericles, who must have been in all their ways so like the Athenians of to-day, were not more instant in the Agora or diligent in writing patriots’ names on oyster-shells than the noisy mob of half-breed patriots who in the sandy streets of Asuncion were ever agitating, always assembling, and doing everything within their power to show the world the perfect picture of a democratic State. Strange that such turbulent and patriotic people should have been ancestors of those whom I, after the termination of the war with Buenos Ayres and Brazil in 1870, knew as lethargic and downtrodden, as if the great dictator, Dr. Francia, whom the country people, speaking in bated breath, called ‘El Difunto’, had still oppressed the land. Into the turbulent hotbed of Asuncion fell Antequera, one of those Creoles of Peru who, born with talent and well educated, seemed, either from the circumstances of their birth or the surroundings amongst which they passed their youth, to differ as entirely from the Spaniards as if they had been Indians and not Creoles of white blood. Like Cardenas, Antequera was endowed with eloquence; but, unlike Cardenas, he set no store on eloquence upon its own account, but only used it for his own advancement in the world. Finding the Governor absent from Asuncion and lying under a decree suspending him from all his functions, it seems at once to have occurred to Antequera to seize his place. On this account, having ingratiated himself with some of those opposed to Balmaceda, he raised an army, and sent to seize him; but the Governor, having notice of the plot, escaped to Corrientes, and Antequera instantly assumed his post. This was too much for the Viceroy of Peru, who, though he had befriended Antequera in the past, had some respect for law. Immediately he issued a decree replacing Balmaceda in the governorship, and ordering Antequera to give him back the power he had usurped. This Antequera had no thought of doing, and he embarked on a career of violence which induced some to believe he intended to proclaim himself an independent king. Whether this was or was not the case, a state of things arose in Paraguay more pandemonic even than in the good old times of Cardenas. The Jesuits, not having seen their way to sustain the cause of their ex-pupil, were expelled once more (1725), and as before took ship for Corrientes amongst the tears of the people, their historians say,[229] and as Ibañez and those who have written against them affirm as strongly, amongst universal joy. Certain it is that in Asuncion they played a different part from that played by them in the mission territory, and no doubt mixed, as did the other Orders of religion, in the intrigues which never seemed to cease in the restless capital of Paraguay.
Not being content with the expulsion of the Jesuits, Antequera defeated several generals sent against him by the Viceroy of Peru, and by a coup de main took prisoner the ex-Governor Balmaceda, having surprised him in his house in Corrientes, and carried him back to Asuncion under a close guard. The usual reign of terror then began, and everything fell into confusion, till at last the King (Philip V.) in 1726 commanded that the Jesuits should be reinstated in their college in Asuncion, and that the missions should be taken from the jurisdiction of the Governors of Paraguay and placed under the control of the Governor of the River Plate, as had been previously done in the case of the other Jesuit missions beyond the Uruguay. But Spain was far away, and on one pretext or another so much delay occurred that it was not till March 18, 1728, that the Jesuits were reinstated in the college in Asuncion, which they were now fated to hold but for a little space. At last the Viceroy of Peru, the Marquess of Castel Fuerte, sent Don Bruno de Zavala with a sufficient army and six thousand Indians from the missions against the usurper Antequera, who fled for refuge to the Franciscan convent in Cordoba, where he remained, till, finding his position quite untenable, he fled to Charcas, where he was arrested, and sent to Lima to await his trial. Four years he waited in perfect liberty, going and coming about the town as it best pleased him, whilst the High Court heard evidence, wrote to Madrid, received instructions from the King, and generally displayed the incapacity which in all ages has been the chief distinctive features of every court of law.