From the editor.

• Author: Kiernan, James Patrick
• Position: Editorial

Years ago I visited the remains of the seven eighteenth-century Jesuit missions known as the Sete Povos, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The article by Kathleen de Azevedo in this issue of Americas brought back memories.

In the evening of my visit, at what is now the shell of the former mission church of Sao Miguel Arcanjo, visitors were offered a light-and-sound show. Stirring music, recorded canon fire, distant voices, the clash of battle noises and, above it all, the rich baritone voice of the narrator punctuated the dramatic illumination of the former church. He told the tale of Guarani Indians and Spanish Jesuit missionaries who rose up against Portuguese authorities to defend their villages, and lost. Those who have seen the film The Mission know the story.

However, what struck me most that moonless hight was the ambiguity of tale. Regret that the seven towns were destroyed was expressed, but there was no association drawn between then and now; the narrator could not draw humanity from the stones. It was a story in a vacuum; it could have been a fairy tale. The remains of the missions appeared no more relevant to present-day Brazil than Stonehenge does to England; Machu Picehu is closer in time and feeling to modern Peru than the Sete Povos are to Rio Grande do SUI. Azevedo writes of the same ambiguities and comes, I believe, to the right conclusions.

In ways that remind us of the Guarani, caught between the power politics of the Spanish and Portuguese, Victor Englebert elucidates the dilemma of the Guambianos of today's Colombia, who find themselves mired between guerrillas...