In 1607 the Andean parishioners of San Damián in Huarochirí brought a formal complaint against their priest, alleging extortion, forced labour and abuse. Ávila's response was to open a different case. He gathered testimony that his accusers were still worshipping the huacas of the district, collected the objects to prove it, and in 1609 held a public ceremony in Lima at which those objects were burned and an Andean religious specialist was flogged and exiled. The archbishop was persuaded, the extirpation of idolatry became an organised programme of the archdiocese, and Ávila was appointed its first visitor.
Over the following decades teams travelled the highland parishes taking depositions, destroying shrines and mummies, and punishing those they identified as teachers. The extirpation records they generated are now among the richest sources on Andean religion in existence, and they exist because their authors were trying to end it. That is the standing problem with the whole archive: it is detailed, it is close to the ground, it names practices and places and people, and every word of it was produced under duress by people with reason to lie in whichever direction seemed safest. Ávila built a career out of it, moving on to posts at Huánuco, in Lima and in Charcas, and the campaign he began ran on in the archdiocese for decades after he had left the parish that provoked it.