Paraguay

The sun was already low in the sky when I arrived at the 17th-century Jesuit mission known as Trinidad, deep in the back country of southern Paraguay. It was late on a warm Saturday afternoon in October, and I was heading across a grass plaza to the main church, intent on examining a richly ornamented frieze depicting chubby angels playing musical instruments. Suddenly, a Baroque chamber concerto erupted from hidden loudspeakers.

As I paused to listen, the mission caretakers told me that the music was written not by a European composer but by the Guaraní Indians who lived for 150 years under Jesuit tutelage on missions spread over an area larger than California in what today is Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. And with that, a vanished world instantly came alive.

The Guaraní missions are all that remain of a 17th- and 18th-century utopian social experiment — call it theocratic communism for lack of a better term — that has fascinated thinkers for hundreds of years. Voltaire, Diderot and Montesquieu all wrote about the missions, praising the egalitarian impulse behind them.

From the time the Jesuits were expelled from them in the 1760s, the missions began to decline and even vanish. In our own time, right-wing military dictatorships ruled all three countries well into the 1980s, and viewed any radical social experiment, even one from the past based on Christianity, as something to be discouraged.

Thanks in part to Roland Joffe’s 1986 movie “The Mission,” there was a renewed surge of interest in the movement in the 1980s. Still, it was only in recent years that Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil began to restore and promote the missions — which, at their peak, had more than 100,000 residents and produced not just music and books, but also metal utensils and food for export — as tourist destinations.

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