Entre la pluma y la cruz

Arrived in the New World in 1541 along with the famous Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish priest Martín González lived for years with the indigenous people of Paraguay, learning their language and developing the first strategies of evangelization; he confronted the local civil and religious authorities in denouncing the terrible abuses suffered by the natives at the hands of the European colonizers; he wrote letters to the metropolis to warn about the situation and finally abandoned the province secretly, risking his life, to undertake a long journey back to Spain through La Plata, Cuzco, Lima, Guayaquil, Quito, Carthage, Cartagena de las Indias , Havana, the Azores and Lisbon, to give their testimony personally before the Crown. Its history, fragmentarily reconstructed by Guillaume Candela through a meticulous archive investigation, is reproduced here not only as a testimony of the early struggle for the rights of the indigenous-- a cause shared by many other religious in America, among which it stands out the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas-- but also for what it reveals about the society of conquest in sixteenth-century Paraguay. Gathered in the documentary Appendix of this volume, the letters, information and other writings of González, many of them transcribed for the first time, show a striking image of the first decades of the colonizing action, which puts in doubt the idyllic visions about of the Hispano-Guaraní alliance. "This is a work that opens new paths in history, undoes wrongs and clarifies the darkness from which we hardly get out," writes Bartomeu Melià in his prologue. "With books of this kind the story will be told and taught, and we hope that it will be lived, so that this nation that boasts of being Guarani will open up and learn to respect the human rights of everyone. Indigenous people can be alien to us, what happened and has been happening to them is the thermometer of our humanity and a figure of our historical health."