TENTH ABUSE
In the extreme parts of the mountains of the provinces of Pampanga, Pangasinan, Ilocos, and others, the regulars possess missions which they call active [vivas] missions. There has been a mission for forty, fifty, or sixty years, without paying tribute or acknowledging the king. If any alcalde has tried to visit them, they have had superabundance of witnesses and testimonies for their right to conduct it;[20] this means that the king supports the missionary, and escorts who guard him. This is a monstrosity; for if he wishes to know the condition and results of the mission the matter is reduced to a lawsuit, until the alcalde is ruined. In reality such missions are advance-posts or custom-houses toward the mountains of the heathen, whence the latter bring down to them their gold, cacao, wax, and other products. This is what employs and occupies the religious father. There are well-founded opinions which assert that the inhabitants of the mountains are not reduced to subjection because of the bad treatment which they know is given them in the missions—where from their foundation there has not been nor is there any Spaniard save the father. It follows from this that, where the father is, there is no lack for vexations against the Indians. Consequently, for the same, and even a stronger reason, the rigor of the decree and laws, and the censure of Fray Gaspar de San Agustin, which are cited in the following abuse, ought to include the regulars.
Remedy for this evil
To prohibit them from engaging in this trading, under penalty of expulsion; and under the same penalty, that they shall not hinder the Indians from going to Manila to sell these and other products which they have, and much less hinder the Spaniards from going to the provinces to buy them, to reside there, and to marry in them, if they wish. To order that the missions be visited, without hindrance, by the bishops in regard to spiritual matters, and by the government; and that, at the proper time, they must pay the tribute in accordance with the laws.
ELEVENTH ABUSE
It is an abuse that the fathers have in every way defended and protected, from the time of the conquest, the Chinese idolaters, apostates, traitors, and sodomites, without any benefit to the community,[21] but with considerable harm in spiritual and temporal affairs; and that they have persecuted the poor Spaniard with so great rancor and eagerness. For it is seen that if any Spaniard goes, on account of misfortune, to the provinces to gain his livelihood, the father immediately orders him to leave, even if he does not lash him, etc.[22]
This is the reason why, after so long a time, there is no other settlement of Spaniards than that of Manila; for in the provinces rarely or never does one see a Spaniard. And, pursuing the same reasoning, after the lapse of so many years we are as strange to the Indians as in the beginning, and even more so, as one can see in the history of the conquest compared with what we all saw during the war.
I venerate, as I ought, the justness of the laws, (xxi and xxii, book vi, título iii, and law i, book vii, título iv, of the Recopilación) which prohibit, in the words of the laws, “Spaniards, negroes, mulattoes, or mestizos from living in the villages of the Indians, for it has been found that some of the first are restless fellows, of evil life, robbers, gamblers, and vicious and abandoned people.” However, conceding for the present whatever crimes and stigmas these laws impute to the Spaniards, I declare and affirm that, with that ban, the regulars have committed more havoc in America and Filipinas than all the locusts together. These (the laws) the regulars order posted in the tribunal houses of the villages, and obey them with such rigor that if the laws concerning the missionaries were observed in the same way there would be no Christianity equal to that of those countries.