The Guaraní War: An Episode at the Jacuí Crossing

In 2026, Rio Grande do Sul marks four hundred years since the founding of the first Jesuit mission — São Nicolau — on May 3, 1626, an achievement of Father Roque Gonzáles de Santa Cruz.

The official history of the Missions, being rehabilitated little by little (since a Portuguese "version" long predominated and, in some measure, concealed the Spanish deeds in the territory of Brazil's southernmost state), records a first missionary cycle extending from 1626 to 1638.

The Missions, founded by priests of the Society of Jesus who came chiefly from Paraguay, gathered thousands of Indigenous people, and introduced agriculture, husbandry, and more specifically cattle raising.

Bandeirantes from São Paulo, however — the slaving expeditions of the Portuguese interior — scattered the priests and set the herds loose, since their great objective was the capture of Indigenous people for forced labor in southeastern Brazil.

It is worth noting that, according to the historian Sandra Jatahy Pesavento, it would be precisely cattle raising that laid the foundations for the occupation of the territory by the Portuguese. Beef, in the form of charque (salted dried meat), would feed the men working in the mines then emerging and growing in Minas Gerais. There was, besides, the use of mules for transport.

Aware that the cattle were breeding loose across the fields and being slaughtered without criteria, the Jesuits returned to Rio Grande do Sul from 1687 onward, when they gradually founded the so-called Seven Peoples of the Missions: São Francisco de Borja, São Nicolau, São Miguel Arcanjo, São Lourenço Mártir, São João Batista, São Luiz Gonzaga, and Santo Ângelo Custódio.

Tau Golin (2014), a historian devoted to the study of the mission peoples, explains that the Seven Peoples were administrative units linked to the Jesuit Province of Paraguay — that is, colonial structures under Spanish dominion, formed of different ethnicities but with a Guaraní predominance.

In 1750, however, Spain and Portugal, the two Iberian Crowns, signed a new territorial treaty updating the old Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494. By the Treaty of Madrid (1750), the Colônia do Sacramento, a Portuguese possession facing Buenos Aires, passed into Spanish hands; in exchange, the Seven Peoples of the Missions were to become Portuguese dominion.

The priests immediately rebelled against the idea and began to act in Rome, Madrid, and Buenos Aires. The Indigenous people refused to leave their homes, their fields, the cemeteries in which their dead lay buried. Confrontation between the boundary-marking troops and the mission peoples became imminent.

What followed was what came to be called the Guaraní War.

Charged with the demarcation of the lands and, subsequently, with the operations of war, on the Portuguese side was General Gomes Freire de Andrada, who had been appointed governor and captain general of Rio de Janeiro in 1733. On account of the events in the south of the colony, his attributions were widened: he became boundary commissioner of the Southern Expedition and head of the Luso-Brazilian army that was to evacuate the mission peoples and take the Seven Peoples of the Missions.

To fulfill his mission in the south, Gomes Freire traveled overland from Rio de Janeiro, which demanded a long journey across lakes, rivers, and every sort of obstacle imposed by nature. Inland, he organized himself at Rio Pardo for the journey to the Missions — though before that he had met with the Spanish at Castillo Grande to draw up the plans of engagement and the taking of the Seven Peoples.

In the winter of 1754, after an intense exchange of correspondence between the military leaders of both banners, Spanish and Portuguese, Gomes Freire set out from Rio Pardo with a great arsenal of war: arms, implements, means of transport, and soldiers. His intention was to move freely to the western region of the old Continent of São Pedro — today the state of Rio Grande do Sul — and attack the mission Indigenous people and the Jesuit priests.

To do so he had to cross the Jacuí River, one of the most important watercourses of the territory and one of the few places that allowed troops to pass. For many years cattle crossed the waters at that point, until in 1849 the then Baron of Caxias ordered a bridge built to ease the passage.

On the other bank of the river, however — in the territory that years later would form the municipality of Restinga Seca, where I was born — were mission Indigenous people from São Luiz, São Miguel, and other towns, prepared for combat. With them was Father Tadeu Henis, responsible for recording the journeys and any engagements. That place would become known as the Passo do Jacuí, the Jacuí Crossing.

There were friendly encounters; exchanges of gifts were recorded; there were attempts to surprise the enemy; there is even mention of a day of barter in which soldiers from opposing sides traded goods of personal interest, coming and going at a point where the river allowed a crossing on foot when the water was low — not to mention that there were taverns and brothels both on the Portuguese banks and on barges.

Time passed, the flood took over the river and soaked the provisions and arms of the Portuguese; the river calmed; friendly visits followed, and new exchanges of gifts, until, pressed by the conditions imposed by the flooding and by the delay in the movement of the Spanish troops, Gomes Freire signed an armistice with the Guaraní some two months after the meeting of the two armies on the banks of the Jacuí.

Under that agreement, the Portuguese would return to Rio Pardo in safety, and all the land situated on that bank of the river as far as the Guaíba river-lake would remain a Portuguese possession. The Guaraní would return to the Missions — though it is true that scholars of the second missionary cycle affirm that cattle ranches extended across the whole territory, including the banks of the Jacuí as far as the Seven Peoples.

And so it was. The Guaraní War would end in 1756, when the great leader of the mission Indigenous people, the warrior Sepé Tiaraju, fell dead in what is today the municipality of São Gabriel.

This essay, besides partly revisiting an episode of the history of Rio Grande do Sul, is also meant to mark — or one might say confirm — the historical milestone that records, for the first time, an important event in that land which years later would form the municipality of Restinga Seca, in the central region of the state, and which official history, even that of the municipality, insists on forgetting.

Professor Elaine dos Santos — Doctor of Letters, Federal University of Santa Maria; Member of the Brazilian Academy of History and Literature.

Translated from the Portuguese original published by the Academia Brasileira de História e Literatura.