ALTAMIRANO, PEDRO IGNACIO. — Spanish Jesuit, born at Cártama (Malaga) on 31 July 1693, and entered the Society in 1708, in the province of Andalusia. Around 1725 he transferred to the province of Mexico, where he taught philosophy at Puebla and governed the houses of Havana and Puerto Principe (Cuba). Sent to Madrid before 1737 on the affairs of his new province, he was appointed (1740) procurator general at the court of Spain for the Jesuit missions of the « Indies ».
Copies of the numerous memorials, manuscript or printed, which he presented in that capacity to the colonial authorities are found in various archives and libraries; they demonstrate great ability and extensive legal knowledge, and provide valuable historical information. A. also wrote an apology for the Mexican Jesuits against the accusations (then reprinted) of the bishop of Puebla, Juan de Palafox; it is found in the volume Sacra Rituum Congregatio... Oxomeusis beatificatio... Ioannis de Palafox (part 1, vol. III, Rome 1788, pp. 173–347). He had returned to the province of Andalusia only a few years earlier when Charles III’s decree expelling the Jesuits found him in Cordova (1767). Deported to Italy, A. died at Rimini on 7 March 1770.
His brother LOPE LUIS, born at Cártama in 1698, a Jesuit from 1716, died at Algajola (Corsica) in 1767. As commissary, he was charged with settling the difficulties that had arisen in the reductions of Paraguay as a consequence of the Hispano-Portuguese treaty of boundaries of 1750; toward the Indians and his own fellow religious he displayed excessive severity.