Tuesday morning of Holy Week I left for Ecarnación, a cosmopolitan city by Paraguayan standards located a drive that ought to be only about five and half hours away from Asunción. The reason I say that the drive ought to be only five and a half hours, though, is because it took us nearly seven and a half hours to get there. Paraguayan bus companies refuse to leave the terminal until every vacant seat has been filled and then, after they leave for the destination city, they pick up every other person along the way who wants to travel. These unfortunate passengers have the bad luck of standing the entire trip, but I’m certain it’s a well-deserved form of karma punishing them for lost time on the trip.
Be that as it may, the bus to Ecarnación at one point had nearly two and a half dozen extra people crammed into the isle. One family, a group of ten indigenous tribesfolk who boarded the bus without seats, stood out particularly to me. Their skin was a dark but brilliant bronze, their cheek bones stuck out like knucklebones, and their hair was equally black and bowl-cut (except for the oldest son, who had a mullet). Paraguayans generally make fun of these sorts of people by saying that they appear so indigenous that they’re only missing the traditional feathers of native tribespeople to complete the look. The grandma among the bunch, though, really was so indigenous that she even carried around the feathers, for luck.
I normally wouldn’t notice the family, but the grandma, who wore a colorful patterned skirt along with a holey t-shirt through which you could see her bare chest indistinguishable from her bare belly, didn’t have a seat. She made it all the way to the back of the bus where I was, too, without anyone offering her their seat as is the respectful Paraguayan custom. Being the culturally-savvy and Christian traveler that I am, though, I offered this dear old Indian woman my seat and stood up with her many children and grandchildren. After a long while some seats cleared and I was able to sit next to my Indian grandma. She tried speaking to me in Guaraní, the national native Paraguayan tongue, but I had no idea what she was saying. Still, she seemed content to talk to me as long as I shook my head and feigned understanding. At one point, a Coke vendor boarded the bus selling drinks to the thirsty travelers. The native grandma tried to give him her lucky feathers in exchange for a cold Coke, but he laughed and refused.
The bus continued on its interminable ride all day long through the unending Paraguayan countryside, full of ranches and estates and tens of thousands of cows grazing on the grassy plains. The land reminded me of old westerns I’ve seen, and at one point I thought I even recognized the ranch from the show Ponderosa. It was beautiful and open and free, though, and real farm country, too, like there is in western Ohio with big tractors and impressive combines and every other sort of farm implement. I saw real cowboys rounding up a herd of cows, along with every other imaginable form of frontier living.
Around five-thirty in the afternoon we finally arrived to Ecarnación. My purpose for the trip wasn’t to meet an indigenous grandma or see the Paraguayan prairie, though, but instead to visit the Jesuit ruins, about the only must-see thing in Paraguayan guidebooks and an officially-declared United Nations World Heritage Site. Located thirty kilometers outside of Ecarnación, the ruins are the remnants of a great missionized society that the Jesuits organized in the 17th and 18th centuries. Here, the Pope’s priests brought together tens of thousands of native Americans into quasi-European social structures and ways of life. The towns were hugely productive and hugely beneficial to the tribespeople, giving them Western society and Christian values and a share in productive work. A 1986 movie starring Robert Dinero, The Mission, offers a unique perspective into the stories of these missions and their ways of life. As the movie also shows, however, the Jesuit project was eventually shut down because the great power held by the Jesuits became a threat to the established imperial governments and the latter’s wanton appetites for colonial exploitation of the native populations.
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