Political communication to defend a frontier

The governors of Paraguay’s letters and their «silences» about the Guaraní militias of the Jesuit reductions in the second half of the 17th century

Abstract

The Archivo General de Indias preserves a series of Governors of Paraguay’s letters from the second half of the 17th century that allow us to understand how those frontiers functioned and how political communication developed from (and towards) those peripheral territories of the monarchy, especially in wartimes. In those periods, the Guaraní Militias of the Paraguay Jesuit reductions played a key role in the military activities of that frontier. However, they were “silenced” in those letters that reached the Spanish monarch’s hands. All this information will be complemented with sources from the Archivo Nacional de Asunción and the Archivo General de la Nación in Buenos Aires in order to understand from the local level those conflicts that were communicated to the crown, and whose discourse many times did not coincide with the information circulated in these territories.