Vanished Arcadia

Here is a tale of remarkable drama and supreme sacrifice, a story discovered by one of the world's greatest writers deep in the jungles of South America. Cunninghame Graham, a lifelong champion of the down-trodden, dedicated his literary genius to telling the forgotten story of the Guarani natives, a people converted to Christianity and then betrayed into slavery. By the mid-1700s European Jesuit priests had converted an estimated one hundred thousand Guarani natives and used their labour to organize a vast theological empire within the borders of Portuguese Brazil. These immense Jesuit-controlled estates raised enormous herds of animals and produced valuable crops which were exported back to Europe, while maintaining schools and churches which taught arts and theology to the natives. After nearly two hundred years of mutual effort, the Guarani and Jesuits had achieved what was described as a 'golden era' of peace and progress. Yet this same wealth, brought about by peaceful means, inspired the envy and resentment of the secular Europeans living in the surrounding countryside. In what would today be described as an act of ethnic cleansing, the Guarani natives were attacked by Spanish and Portuguese troops. Thousands of natives were enslaved, the missions destroyed and the Jesuits driven out. This is the profound story of those innocents massacred in the name of political domination, written by a master-story teller, which inspired the movie "The Mission."