A foundational document of the river border and a key piece of historical silence
The treaty defines that:
- The San Juan belongs to Nicaragua,
- but Costa Rica retains perpetual rights of navigation for commercial purposes,
- and possesses full sovereignty over the right bank of the river along much of its course.
Although this agreement appeared to resolve a historical dispute, in reality it opened a long series of interpretations, tensions, and arbitrations that would last for more than a century. Its application has never been simple, because each article reflects the weight of 19th-century geopolitical interests, when interoceanic transit was one of the most strategic points in the hemisphere.
Relevance within the Las Aguas del Olvido trilogy
Within the framework of the trilogy, the Cañas-Jerez Treaty occupies a central place because it was signed only one year after the Transit Campaign (1856-1857), but without mentioning or using at any point the most forceful military precedent that Costa Rica had to negotiate: the capture of the steamships, the logistic control of the river and the fluvial victory of Major Máximo Blanco.
This omission constitutes one of the thematic axes of the work:
1. The treaty enshrines a border, but ignores the military victory that made it possible.
The strategic weight of the Transit Campaign was decisive in securing a favorable negotiating margin. Even so, its absence in the text reveals a political decision to erase that chapter in order to adjust the historical narrative to internal interests.
2. The documentary silence of the treaty becomes a precedent.
Years later, the legal arguments derived from Cañas–Jerez were used in international litigation (such as the Cleveland Award of 1888 and later in The Hague). But because the Transit Campaign was not incorporated into the original documentary corpus, Costa Rica entered the 20th and 21st centuries with a strategic void in its own legal memory.
3. This historical void favored an incomplete reading of sovereign rights.
The trilogy argues that the neglect of the Costa Rican contribution in the San Juan generated a “dead space” in the interpretation of the treaties, affecting the national narrative and indirectly weakening the Costa Rican position in subsequent litigation related to navigation, sovereignty and territorial limits.
Therefore, the Cañas-Jerez Treaty is not only a legal document:
is the first stone of the long silence that the
