The government of the Moxos and Chiquitos missions after the Jesuit expulsion
When the Jesuits were expelled in 1767 the Crown had to decide who would run thirty-odd Amazonian mission towns. It tried parish priests under a reglamento of 1762, then secular administrators under a plan approved by the Audiencia de Charcas about 1789. Spanish officials fought the question out on paper, and the losing brief survives: it reports fifteen Moxos towns reduced to eleven and Indians who owned nothing of what they made.
Why this wins its question: What happened to the Jesuit missions of Moxos and Chiquitos after 1767 is normally told in one sentence - they declined - and the sentence is usually made to carry a verdict about Spanish rule or about the Jesuits. The eighteenth-century Spanish administration argued the question out in writing, and the losing brief was printed in Buenos Aires in 1836 and is legible today. This entry works from it: the foundation dates with the cabildo papers they rest on, the reglamento of 1762, the twenty-two years of parish government that left fifteen towns as eleven, the exact terms on which the secular administrators took the wax and the cacao, the more than five hundred men kept at the oar to Santa Cruz, and the reform's own author saying the enslaved in the French colonies were better off. It also records the two things that make the document honest to use rather than convenient: the author was a rival official with an intendancy to gain, and the plain those towns stood on had carried dense societies for a thousand years before any of them arrived.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The missions had a documented institutional history before the Jesuits arrived, and Viedma gives it with the papers he read it in. The Moxos were discovered in 1562 and the city of Santisima Trinidad founded on their borders, where the governors placed their lieutenants; the towns were granted in encomienda for two lives to Gonzalo de Solis Holguin by governor Martin de Almendras Holguin, by title issued on 2 October 1607 before the public notary Pedro de Arteaga, and remained in that state until they were handed to the Jesuits in 1671. The Chiquitos were discovered in 1557 by the adelantado Nuflo de Chaves out of Asuncion, subdued in 1681, and put in Jesuit charge in 1691. Viedma footnotes each date to a letter of the cabildo of Santa Cruz of 2 June 1682, an acta capitular of 16 June 1681, and a letter of P. Montenegro of 23 June 1691.
A second printed account of the Chiquitos foundation, by the editor of the 1836 volume rather than by Viedma, dates the first reduction to 1690 under the title Nuestra Senora de la Representacion, founded by the fathers Arce, Gonzalez, Zea and Centeno from the college they had opened at Tarija, and adds what the towns had to be defended against from the start: the Mamalucos, who after laying waste the Guayra and much of Paraguay fell on the new neofitos and dragged them to the markets of Brazil to sell them as slaves, in raids so frequent and destructive that several peoples were finished off "de las que apenas se ha conservado el nombre".
Two eighteenth-century Spanish officials, on opposite sides of the later dispute, agree that the towns were prosperous under the Jesuits and that the prosperity was made by the Indians. The religious, Viedma writes, brought those towns to the greatest state of prosperity with the fruits of their fertile lands "cultivados por los indios, e industriosas manifacturas que les fueron ensenando para el beneficio de ellos con maestros habiles"; the height they had reached by the time of the expulsion is manifest, he says, in the inventory of delivery of the fifteen Moxos towns, as explained by the oidor acting as fiscal in his reply of 1 August 1789 at paragraph 7, and the Chiquitos towns had reached no less.
After 1767 the Crown did not improvise; it substituted parish priests for the Jesuits under written rules. The system, Viedma records, was adopted whole, "sostituyendose en los curas", so that the progress in religion, pacification and industry of those naturales should be kept up; and on those principles and under the same rules the bishop of Santa Cruz, D. Francisco Ramon de Herboso, drew up the reglamento of 15 September 1762, which His Majesty approved.
The result, on the same official's account, was ruin. In the twenty-two years the curas governed the towns "vinieron a quedar un triste esqueleto de lo que habian sido": the fifteen towns of Moxos were reduced to eleven, and part of their opulence was transplanted into the Portuguese dominions. The governors, Viedma writes, were authorised witnesses of the disorders and could put no remedy to them, being forbidden to meddle in the economic government of the curas, and their complaints and representations did not carry the necessary force - until governor Lazaro de Ribera demonstrated the state of the missions before the Audiencia de Charcas with repeated proofs and proposed a new plan of government.
The new plan moved the temporalities from churchmen to laymen, and its declared advantage was accountability. Nothing in it varied from the Jesuit system or from the curas' reglamento, Viedma writes; the only difference is that management "sale de manos eclesiasticas y entra en las de seglares, como propias al manejo de bienes profanos y sin los riesgos de tropezar con el asilo sagrado de no poder hacerles los cargos debidos a una malversacion". The administrators were made subject to the authority of the governor. His own summary is the sharpest thing in the section: "Lo cierto es, que vemos unas mismas reglas para el manejo de las misiones en los jesuitas, en los curas y ahora en los administradores seculares."
What that meant in the towns is set out item by item, and it is the passage that makes this dispute worth recovering. The Indians deposit all their precious manufactures in the hands of the administrators, "quienes les toman una rigorosa cuenta para evitar su ocultacion", and receive back from them the poor clothing that covers them and the food they subsist on; except for maize, plantains, yuca and wild fruits, everything their land produces - cacao, coffee, sugar, and above all the wax, whose gathering "tanto trabajo, fatigas y aun muertes les cuesta" - must be handed over, on pain of punishments allowed by the Audiencia "si acaso no se exceden" or of whatever the governor should determine. The Moxos additionally carry every consignment upriver by canoe to the port of Jores or Payla for overland carriage to the receiving house at Santa Cruz, "en cuyo duro trabajo se ocupan mas de 500, sin otro premio que la triste racion que llevan para su sustento".
The comparison that follows was made by the man who had asked for the new plan, not by its opponent. Viedma writes that governor Ribera says with reason in his general report "que los esclavos de las colonias francesas son mas felices que estos naturales", because the enslaved in those colonies are left the use of their liberty and can profit by some small part of their own sweat and fatigue, "pero a estos infelices se les priva de lo mas minimo, y lo poco que disfrutan ha de venir de mano de los administradores". Viedma's own gloss: "Habra constitucion mas rigorosa en todas las naciones del universo? Si no me engano, estoy firmemente persuadido que no se dara egemplar semejante." The comparison is a polemical device used by two Spanish officials against a Spanish institution, and it is recorded here as their language, not as a measured finding about slavery in the French Antilles.
Viedma's specific charge against the reform is that it took away the one margin the previous regime had left. The oppressions of tyranny and slavery charged against the curas in the files sent up to the Audiencia, he concedes, are particular and against determinate persons, some of them the effect of passion and some perhaps provoked by the Indians themselves; but compared with what the new plan brings they are the lesser burden, because the curas, under articles 36 to 43 of the Herboso reglamento, allowed the Indians some relief in which they could make use of the products of their labour, "y el nuevo plan de gobierno les prohibe lo mas minimo, en tales terminos, que nada se castiga con mayor rigor".
He does not spare the clergy in order to make that argument, which is what keeps it from being a defence of the old order. "Yo no niego los desordenes de estos eclesiasticos", he writes: their irregular management and the excesses committed against their miserable parishioners, which lost those towns and corrupted their customs, and their infidelity to the trust the King placed in them, which went so far as to favour the Crown's rivals in the extension of their establishments. He then generalises the charge to the secular clergy of the Alto Peru, asking what cruelties they have not done to their unhappy Indians, "obligandoles a tiranas pensiones para el servicio de su casa, azotandoles con inhumanidad a la mas minima repugnancia, y pensionandolos a otras muchas gabelas, a titulo de costumbre".
The plain the missions stood on was not empty land before any of this. Archaeological work on the Llanos de Mojos describes "large and elaborate earthworks, constructed throughout the first millennium AD, attesting to the development of large and sedentary societies" - monumental mounds, causeways, canals and walled ponds - with the mound of Loma Salvatierra, in an interfluvial area some 50 km from the Mamore, occupied between about 500 and 1400 AD and provided with a network of circular walled ponds connected to canals. The society the reductions gathered had built and managed that landscape long before a Spanish town plan was laid over it.
What this entry deliberately does not assert. Almost everything here comes from one side of one dispute: Viedma's brief against Ribera's plan, printed in 1836, which quotes the fiscal and the governor but is not their own papers. No population figure for the missions is asserted except as the fiscal's own words, no date is given for the approval of the new plan beyond its being in force when Viedma wrote and awaiting royal confirmation, and nothing is claimed about what the Council of the Indies decided, because the pages opened do not say. The musical and craft archives for which the Chiquitos towns are known today are outside every source used here and are not mentioned. The archaeological source cited for the pre-Hispanic landscape says nothing whatever about the missions. The entry is tiered secondary although its anchor is a digitised original read page by page, because two of its claims rest on an 1836 editorial preface and on a modern archaeological paper, and the tier of an object is set by the weakest source it cites.