Records for the year 1554 show that Portuguese slave hunters near San Paulo, Brazil captured 69 thousand Indian slaves that year. In 1585, twelve thousand Indians under the leadership of Louis Montoya, SJ slipped away into the jungle and began an escape that has been compared to the Exodus. In 600 balsa boats they fled down the Patama River and a thousand miles inland with the slave hunters in pursuit. 
They encountered the impassable Whitall falls - audible for twenty miles, two times the height of Niagara with nine times the water volume. Here they lost 100 balsas trying to float them over the falls. Finally they had to portage everything 25 miles around the falls and down into the jungles of Paraguay where they finally lost the slavers.
In one generation they built thirteen towns or “reductions” incorporating the local cannibalistic tribes. They doubled that number in the next generation and then doubled it again. The towns might contain as many as ten tribes with different languages. Guarani was chosen as the common language for all including the Jesuits. The first years in the founding of a town were spent working together building longhouses and workshops. Only after five years would the building of the church begin. When a town reached five thousand inhabitants another was founded.
Towns were governed by a “cabildo” of 20 native leaders, with a single Jesuit spiritual leader and Jesuit brother directing the building programs.
Together they produced the first literate society of the Western Hemisphere, craftsmen, sculptors, violin makers and musicians of Baroque music equal to those of Europe. Native cavalry with light artillery protected the towns and patrolled the roads. They retained the native custom of tilling fields communally – with the accompaniment of music. Each family also had its own plot. The town of St Ignatius had five square miles of stone buildings. In Loretto it is said a person could walk through the whole town without ever stepping out into the rain. By 1700, a hundred thousand natives lived and prospered in these Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay.
They encountered the impassable Whitall falls - audible for twenty miles, two times the height of Niagara with nine times the water volume. Here they lost 100 balsas trying to float them over the falls. Finally they had to portage everything 25 miles around the falls and down into the jungles of Paraguay where they finally lost the slavers.In one generation they built thirteen towns or “reductions” incorporating the local cannibalistic tribes. They doubled that number in the next generation and then doubled it again. The towns might contain as many as ten tribes with different languages. Guarani was chosen as the common language for all including the Jesuits. The first years in the founding of a town were spent working together building longhouses and workshops. Only after five years would the building of the church begin. When a town reached five thousand inhabitants another was founded.
Towns were governed by a “cabildo” of 20 native leaders, with a single Jesuit spiritual leader and Jesuit brother directing the building programs.
Together they produced the first literate society of the Western Hemisphere, craftsmen, sculptors, violin makers and musicians of Baroque music equal to those of Europe. Native cavalry with light artillery protected the towns and patrolled the roads. They retained the native custom of tilling fields communally – with the accompaniment of music. Each family also had its own plot. The town of St Ignatius had five square miles of stone buildings. In Loretto it is said a person could walk through the whole town without ever stepping out into the rain. By 1700, a hundred thousand natives lived and prospered in these Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay. 
This apparently utopian life ceased abruptly when the Jesuit order was suppressed by the Pope. Sealed orders from the Spanish monarch Charles III were transcribed by children for secrecy. “For compelling reasons locked in the Royal Breast” all Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish Empire in 1767. The Jesuits were taken to Corsica in chains and the natives again fell prey to Spanish rapacity and fled into the jungle. The abandoned reductions fell to ruin. This story is well known.
What is not so well known is that the Reductions also spread northward into Bolivia where thirty towns flourished among the Chiquitano people with a total of a hundred thousand inhabitants. Unlike the Paraguay Reductions, these did not all dissolve when the Jesuits departed. The churches and the traditions were preserved by native leaders. In the last thirty years many of the churches and artworks have been restored under the leadership of a German ex-Jesuit.
The restoration has respected original building methods which used only local materials - native wood, oil from Cusi nuts for paint, minerals for color, mica for decoration. The resurrected carvings have been described as some of the most sensitive sculpture in the history of art.The art and music and worship of the Chiquitano continue today in living communities. Chiquitano Baroque choral groups travel to Europe for concert and competition.
Liturgy is a regular and vibrant celebration. If you should ever have the opportunity to visit the Jesuit Reductions in Bolivia, I think it will gladden your heart. 
