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Welcome to Las Aguas del Olvido, a trilogy that explores the destiny of the San Juan River and its profound impact on Costa Rica and Central America through history, memory, and geopolitics. From the most brilliant military campaign that the country decided to forget, to the lawsuits and treaties that defined its river border, these three books reveal how a century and a half of silence shaped Costa Rica’s identity and strategic opportunities. Below, you will find a presentation of the three works that make up this project: the novel Las Aguas Amargas del San Juan, the historical essay Aguas Silenciadas, and the final volume that analyzes the present and geopolitical future of the region. Each one illuminates a section of the same current: that of the river, that of history, and that of what Costa Rica could no longer keep silent.

Book I — The Bitter Waters of the San JuanThe WatersBitter Waters of the San Juan

The hero that history decided to forget.

In 1856, Major Máximo Blanco Rodríguez lled a decisive campaign that saved Costa Rica from invasion and slavery. He captured steamers, blocked the Transit Route and broke the backbone of William Walker’s filibusters.
His victory was total.
His name, however, was erased.

Las Aguas Amargas del San Juan reconstructs—with documented rigor and epic narrative—the campaign that transformed the country’s destiny, but was silenced by the interests of those who feared the rise of their own hero.

This first book opens the wound, illuminates the truth and returns to the memory what the official history hid.

Book II —Silenced Waters

The conspiracy of silence.

For more than a century, the Transit Campaign was distorted, cut short, or completely omitted.
This book demonstrates why.

Based on forbidden diaries, military archives, diplomatic correspondence, and documents forgotten in Costa Rica, the United States, and Europe, Aguas Silenciadas reveals that the forgetting of Máximo Blanco—and of the river campaign—was no coincidence.
It was a political pact, sustained from the end of the Morista regime until the creation of the Second Republic in the 20th century.

This volume dismantles the silence and names its architects.

Book III — The Water Border (in preparation)

The endless litigation.

The San Juan river route is not just history: it is living geopolitics.
The Cañas–Jerez treaty, the Cleveland Award, the Isla Calero dispute, the navigation conflicts, and more than a century of international arbitrations have shaped Central America’s most fragile and symbolic border.

This third book traces the major litigations that arose after the 1856–1857 campaign and shows how their shadows still define our relationship with the river, with Nicaragua, and with the region’s interoceanic future.

The complete trilogy builds a bridge between war, silence, and law:
the memory that resurfaces, the silence that crumbles, and the border that is finally illuminated.