ABSTRACT
It was precisely the Jesuit order that turned the missions into an indispensable element to attain successfully both spiritual, material and territorial control of the native people and the Pacific coast, acting as an authentic advance party of a political system which had recourse to it at given moments, according to Eugene H. Bolton’s account (1990). In this context, it was the members of the Company of Jesus who defined a management model that determined what Ignacio del Río (2003) called the Jesuit Regime, insofar as it represented a way of understanding the spread of faith and in which the characteristics of the territory led to the fusion of religious and political tasks.
