Hernandarias de Saavedra — the governor who asked for missionaries because he had no army

Governor of the southern provinces at the turn of the seventeenth century, beaten and taken prisoner on the way to the strait of Magellan, and the man who told Madrid he was not strong enough to impose the law on the peoples of the Guayra and proposed to send priests instead. A royal cedula of 1608 approved it; the Jesuits sailed in December 1609; the missions began in 1610. The same page of the same historian records why the reduced Indians were deserting: the tyranny of the Spaniards.