Brazil's ruins of the double crosspiece: now mere remnants of a turbulent past, the missions in this nation's southeast were once bustling commercial and religious centers for Guarani Indians.

• Author: de Azevedo, Kathleen

The night bus rolls into the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost state, passing lonely towns throbbing softly from street lights. Once in a while, the bus pulls to the side of the road to let off passengers. A woman clutching several plastic bags of clothes nudges a couple of children down the aisle. A pair of broken voices from two men sitting in the first row interrupt the silence. One of the men speaks with a heavy regional accent that sounds almost German. The other can barely understand him, and at one point, they get into a discussion, the German-sounding one hammering the word "asfalto! asfalto." talking about an asphalt road, while the man beside him cries out "assalto?" assalto?" envisioning a robbery. Once they settle the misunderstanding, the only sound is the soft crunch of paper bags under shifting sleepers. A soft gaucho rain feathers the windows as the bus approaches the small city of Santo Angelo.

Santo Angelo is small enough to be woken by the clop and jangle of horse drawn carts, yet large enough to have a street of pharmacies next to a street of funeral homes. Thoughtful-looking old men, some with hands in their pockets, wait around a storefront campaign office. Shriveled balloons decorate a placard of a local candidate, a modest political campaign for an area that was once engaged in a battle, not only for power, but for the souls of men. Santo Angelo, formally called Santo Angelo Custodio, was once one of seven Brazilian mission settlements known as the Sete Povos. Mission settlements, or "reductions," at one time covered a twelve-hundred mile swath of Paraguay, Argentina, and Guaira, which is now southeastern Brazil. The reductions functioned as refuges and as proselytizing centers for the Guarani Indians, and produced everything from crops to musical instruments to an international conflict.

The Sete Povos of Brazil consisted of missions Sao Nicolau, Silo Miguel Arcanjo, Silo Francisco de Borja, Sao Luiz Gonzaga, Sao Lourenco Martir, Sao Joao Batista, and Santo Angelo Custodio. Out of the seven original reductions in this area, only three have recognizable ruins. Today the ruins of the Sete Povos are no more than remnants of stone walls or an occasional statue in a museum, and due to the missions' tempestuous past, most of these ruins are more appreciated by archaeologists than casual tourists. But in their time the missions were both vast religious and commercial centers, representing the once-strong role of the Catholic church in Latin American history.

A lonely clay road, grooved from vehicle tires and rain runoff, leads to the ruins of Mission Sao Batista. A pelt of fine grass sprouts from the surrounding farmland, which has been cut with tractor blades. A massive tree with a thick, squat trunk and gnarled expansive limbs rattles with a racket of birds. A grey monjita, a white stripe cutting across each of its black-tipped wings, suddenly peels out from the branches, rising and curling in the wind. The emus, indigenous to this region, seem to float along the green fields. They walk casually, but their legs are so long that their stroll eats up distance. They ruffle big plumes and lope over one rolling hill and down another, until only their swaying heads are visible as they descend down a dip in the landscape.

More common than the occasional farmhouse are houses of the dead. Along this roadside, or sometimes in a solitary field, families have erected graves, some of which look like small makeshift cabins...