Las Agua
In December 1856, while history books focused on the battles of Santa Rosa and Rivas, another decisive scenario burned far from official view: the San Juan River, the living artery between Central America and global ambitions.
There, Major Máximo Blanco Rodríguez, commander of the unknown Vanguard Column, led Costa Rica’s most audacious and effective river military campaign: the capture of nine filibuster steamboats, absolute control of the Transit Route—the fastest interoceanic corridor in the hemisphere—and the logistical dismantling of William Walker’s army.
But this extraordinary victory was not celebrated. It was erased.
Las Aguas Amargas del San Juan reconstructs, with documentary rigor and literary force, the epic of those days: jungle, mud, fever, wet gunpowder, hunger, courage, betrayals, precarious alliances, and tactical decisions that changed the destiny of the isthmus. The story introduces us to a war that Costa Rica won on the water, but lost in memory.
Based on personal diaries, military archives from Costa Rica, Nicaragua, the United States and Europe, and unpublished sources, the novel relives the steps of Blanco and his men: the assault on armed steamers, the capture of El Castillo, the operation to deceive the Virgin with the famous curtains, the resistance in La Trinidad and the wear and tear of a troop that fought against the enemy, the weather, the diseases… and the
The result is a vibrant and necessary story: the vindication of the hero that
The novel sets the stage for the second book of the trilogy, Aguas Silenciadas, where it will be demonstrated, with historical and legal evidence, that the oblivion was not accidental: it was deliberate.
From the twilight of the 19th century to the consolidation of the Second Republic, the political elites shaped a national narrative that excluded the Transit Campaign, the figure of Máximo Blanco, and the geopolitical role of the San Juan in the construction of the Costa Rican State.
While Costa Rica litigated for more than a century over its river border—in the Cañas–Jerez Treaty, the Cleveland Award, the Isla Calero dispute, and the ruling of The Hague—the absence of this campaign in official memory created a historical vacuum that weakened the country’s position and prevented it from narrating itself as a victorious river power.
Las Aguas Amargas del San Juan is, therefore, the gateway to a profound debate:
How does it affect a country to forget the victory that defined its border?
What does a nation lose by renouncing its own past?
The third book of the trilogy will explore how inherited silences continue to condition e
Where Costa Rica once had a strategic position—military, fluvial, and diplomatic—today it faces the challenge of reconstructing its own story to recover lost opportunities.
La Frontera del Agua will project this story into the 21st century:
- the continental competition for new interoceanic routes,
- the role of China, Mexico, and Central America,
- and the place that Costa Rica could claim if it recovers the historical memory that politics snatched from it.
– A trilogy that rewrites the memory of a country
Las Aguas Amargas del San Juan is just the beginning of The Trilogy of the Waters of Oblivion, a narrative and investigative project that unites novel, essay, geopolitics, and historical memory to reveal:
- the campaign that Costa Rica won and forgot,
- the wall of silence that erased it,
- and the path to reconstruct the narrative sovereignty of a country that still does not tell its whole truth.
The first installment will arrive very soon.
And with it, the story that Costa Rica needed to recover.
