A historical reconstruction of the forgotten river campaign (1856–1857)
Silenced Waters is a historical-documentary study that examines one of the most persistent phenomena in Costa Rican collective memory: the deliberate elimination of the Transit Campaign (1856–1857) and its main military architect, Major Máximo Blanco Rodríguez, from the institutional narrative and the national imagination. Based on primary sources—military diaries, diplomatic correspondence, North American and European archives, censored testimonies, and state documents—the book reconstructs both the events and the mechanisms of their erasure.
The central focus of the analysis is the operation of forgetting undertaken by sectors of the Costa Rican political elite starting in 1857. The book argues that this omission was not accidental or the result of “historiographical gaps,” but rather a political pact of convenience, arising after the fall of President Juan Rafael Mora and consolidated by his adversaries. Silenced Waters argues that the figure of Blanco—a professional, charismatic, victorious, independent soldier, author of a critical diary, and an inconvenient witness—represented an obstacle to a national narrative that privileged certain actors and relegated others to the shadows.
The book traces a continuity between that nineteenth-century silencing and the way in which, during the 20th century, particularly under the Second Republic, a national vision based on pacifist exceptionalism, demilitarization, and the symbolic reinterpretation of heroism was adopted and strengthened. Within this new narrative framework, the figure of Blanco—a military strategist, protagonist of offensive river operations, and symbol of the armed power of the State—was inconvenient. Official memory preferred to frame the 1856 conflict in more easily domesticated episodes, such as Rivas and Santa Rosa, leaving out the geostrategic dimension of the San Juan River and the impact it had on 19th-century interoceanic politics.
Silenced Waters also examines how this omission affected the way Costa Rica faced its main border disputes in the 19th and 20th centuries: the Cañas–Jerez Treaty (1858), the Cleveland Award (1888), the disputes arising from the Bryan–Chamorro Treaty, and the most recent resolutions before the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The book argues that the lack of a comprehensive historical understanding of the fluvial domain of the San Juan River weakened the Costa Rican strategic narrative, hindered the construction of a coherent doctrine, and limited the country’s ability to articulate a position fully grounded in its own military and territorial experience.
Through a critical analysis of period documents, historical press, and school manuals, the book highlights the discursive transformations, canonization practices, and ideological biases that shaped national memory. It is demonstrated that Blanco’s disappearance from patriotic accounts was not an accident of time, but the result of an active political engineering of memory.
Silenced Waters, far from being a historiographical settling of accounts, proposes a comprehensive recovery of documentary truth and a mature reconsideration of the past. Its purpose is twofold: on the one hand, to rescue an episode of transcendental importance for Central American history; on the other, to offer current generations a more complete understanding of how national narratives are constructed, manipulated, and disputed.
It is, in short, a book that illuminates the mechanisms of oblivion and demonstrates that, sometimes, a people’s greatest victory is to remember what they were prevented from knowing for a century and a half.
