Guaraní

Speakers of the Guarani language, which distinguishes them from their Tupi relatives, the Guaraní are several closely related Indigenous peoples of the forests and rivers of central South America. Their traditional lands lie in what is now Paraguay, between the Paraná and lower Paraguay rivers, and stretch into north-eastern Argentina, southern Brazil, Uruguay and Bolivia. Estimates of their number today run from about 280,000 to 390,000, and their language is spoken far beyond the Guaraní themselves: it is an official language of Paraguay alongside Spanish.

Before European contact the people called themselves Abá, "men" or "people". The name Guaraní was later applied by Jesuit missionaries to converts, and it may come from a Tupi-Guarani word for warrior. Early villages were built around large communal houses, each sheltering several families under a chief, and communities grouped by dialect. When Europeans arrived there were perhaps 400,000 Guaraní, settled farmers who grew manioc and maize and also hunted and collected honey. Their beliefs placed a first father, Ñamandu, at the head of a pantheon that included Tupã, and peopled forests and rivers with spirits; the Iguazu Falls were sacred, and much of this lore survives in rural Paraguayan folklore.

Spanish expeditions reached the region from the 1510s, and Asunción was founded in 1537. Early alliances, in which chiefs gave women to newcomers to bind them as kin, gave way after 1541 to violent seizures of women who were sold and traded as slaves, a practice a priest denounced in 1545. When a chief named Aracare refused to serve a Spanish expedition in 1542 and was hanged, a rising followed and failed. Mixed families formed in these years became the core of the Paraguayan nation.

Jesuits arrived in the 1580s, and in 1607–08 the Spanish Crown authorised them to convert and settle the peoples of Guayrá. The first mission, Loreto, was founded in 1610, and the missions grew quickly because they offered protection from enslavement. Slave raiders from São Paulo attacked them from 1629, burning missions and, by one older estimate, carrying off some 60,000 people for sale. The Jesuits obtained royal permission for the Guaraní to bear firearms, and in 1641 an armed Guaraní force defeated an 800-strong raiding army on the Acaray River. By 1732 there were 30 missions with 141,252 Guaraní, defended by a trained militia; a smallpox epidemic two years later killed about 30,000.

The Treaty of Madrid of 1750 handed seven missions east of the Uruguay River to the Portuguese Empire and ordered their people to leave. They refused, and the Guaraní War of 1754–1756 killed thousands. In 1767 the Spanish Empire expelled the Jesuits from all its lands. Under new administrators the missions declined fast: an official census of 1801 found fewer than 45,000 Guaraní there, and in 1848 Paraguay declared the few remaining mission Indians citizens.

The Guaraní of the Andean foothills, long called Chiriguanos, followed a different path. They resisted the Inca, then Spain and later the Bolivian state from the late fifteenth century to the late nineteenth, and were finally defeated in 1892 at the Battle of Kuruyuki. Today they live in the Gran Chaco of south-eastern Bolivia in three main groups, the Ava, Simba and Izoceño, and their representative body is the Assembly of the Guarani People; Charagua is an autonomous Guaraní territory.

Guarani is an official language in Paraguay and Bolivia, and around 2012 an estimated 90 per cent of Paraguayans spoke it, learning it at home and in school. Recent counts give 135,232 Guaraní in Argentina (2022), 103,712 in Bolivia (2024), about 85,000 in Brazil (2017) and 73,607 in Paraguay (2024). In Argentina, community patrols guard forests against illegal logging, and land remains a central issue for Guaraní groups in several countries.

Our 1492 map draws approximate Guaraní territories under Guarani-language labels: "Tekohá (Guarani)" for the main area, with separate outlines for the Ñandeva (Avá Guaraní) and the Mbya, and the outlines are rough indications. Neighbours include the Charrúa to the south and the Kaingang to the east.