Ava

The Ava, or Guaraní, are Tupi-Guarani-speaking peoples whose homelands stretch from the Paraguay and Paraná basins into the Andean foothills of eastern Bolivia, where the warlike Chiriguano branch long held off the Inca and the Spanish. Their self-name Abá or Ava means people. Before contact they were sedentary farmers in communal maloca houses and may have numbered 400,000.

From 1610 the Jesuits gathered them into the Paraguayan reductions, which in 1732 held more than 140,000 converts, defended by a drilled army against Paulista slave raiders.

The 1750 Treaty of Madrid triggered the Guaraní War of 1754–1756. The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 began the collapse of the reductions; by 1801 fewer than 45,000 mission Guaraní remained. Bolivian groups around the Pilcomayo and Parapetí kept their independence longer, entering the nineteenth century as distinct Ava and other communities.