Northeast historical timeline

The northeast’s history is Guarani and Jesuit, and then the story of a war that emptied it.

The Guarani

Semi-sedentary farmers of cassava and maize across this river country, speaking a language that became the regional lingua franca and remains one.

The reductions

From 1609 the Jesuits gathered Guarani into mission towns — thirty of them across what is now Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, some holding several thousand people. They were laid out to a standard plan around a great church, ran their own agriculture and workshops, printed books in Guarani, taught music to a high standard, and were defended by Guarani militias against Portuguese slave raiders. Whether they were a refuge or a form of control is argued over; that they were unlike anything else in colonial America is not. The Jesuits were expelled from Spanish territory in 1767, the missions declined within a generation, and the forest took them.

The War of the Triple Alliance

Between 1864 and 1870, Paraguay fought Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, and the northeast was the theatre. It was proportionally among the deadliest wars in modern history, devastating Paraguay and depopulating the border country.

Yerba and immigration

Misiones was colonised from the 1890s by Polish, Ukrainian, German and Brazilian settlers who cleared forest for yerba mate and tea, which is why the province’s villages have Slavic churches.

The missions in the imagination

The reductions have had an unusually long afterlife. Voltaire mocked them, Enlightenment writers cited them as evidence for and against almost every position, and the 1986 film The Mission put them back into general awareness — filmed partly at Iguazu, with the falls standing in for the ones the Jesuits actually climbed. The ruins at San Ignacio are quieter and more affecting than any of that suggests.

Rewilding

From the late 1990s, land purchases in Ibera began the reintroduction programme that has since restored the jaguar.