Since the mid-19th century, Costa Rican historiography has described the Transit Campaign as just another military episode in the war against William Walker. However, a strategic reading – the one that dialogues with infrastructure, logistics and geopolitics – reveals something deeper: whoever controlled the San Juan controlled the fastest inter-oceanic corridor in the western hemisphere before the Panama Canal.
1. The San Juan: global artery before becoming a border.
Between 1849 and 1856, the Transit Route moved thousands of passengers to California at the height of the gold rush.
This inter-oceanic flow turned the river into:
- the most efficient route between the Atlantic and the Pacific, decades before the Panama Canal,
- a critical trade corridor for the United States,
- a point of friction between Anglo-Saxon powers,
- a liminal territory where sovereignty was not only juridical, but also logistical.
When Walker militarized the route and transformed civilian steamers into armed vessels, the San Juan ceased to be commerce: it became a theater of war.
2. The Costa Rican shift: from territorial defense to logistical disruption
Costa Rica entered the war to stop the filibuster threat; but on the ground, the logic changed.
Once the border was crossed and positions were taken on the river, the Costa Rican column identified an unprecedented strategic opportunity: to cut the enemy logistical chain at its most vulnerable point – the water.
Mastering the San Juan meant:
- interrupt the supply and movement of enemy troops,
- to dismantle the filibuster’s ability to sustain itself in Nicaragua,
- blocking the route connecting two oceans,
- demonstrate “functional” sovereignty through
material control of the corridor, something that today we would call operational control.
This step-capturing steamers, taking up positions, reconfiguring mobility-marks the moment when a defensive campaign becomes an operation with hemispheric projection.
3. Nine steamships: more than ships, strategic infrastructure
The successive capture of steamers was not a symbol, it was a decommissioned infrastructure.
Each vessel represented:
- military transport,
- civilian transport,
- economic mobility,
- negotiation capacity for external stakeholders.
From a contemporary perspective, taking away nine steamers from the enemy would be equivalent today to neutralizing its entire logistic fleet and access to its main ports.
The strategic impact was enormous and, nevertheless, little incorporated later in the national story.
4. Why does it matter today?
Because oblivion did not annul the transcendence of the fact: continuing without integrating the experience of the San Juan as a strategic base limits the understanding of the interoceanic corridor in the present, just when it is once again being discussed in terms of global connectivity, infrastructure and new interested powers.
The Transit Campaign shows that Costa Rica already acted once as an interoceanic protagonist, but that memory did not become doctrine, neither academic nor state.
Their absence has had consequences:
- less weight in international negotiations,
- argumentative weakness in border disputes,
- failure to take advantage of historical precedent in contemporary diplomacy,
- difficulty in positioning itself as a strategic player in future projects.
5. From the river to the future
Understanding the San Juan as a strategic space, and not only as a border, opens the horizon once again:
- renewed logistics infrastructure,
- alternative corridors in a fragmented world,
- binational cooperation instead of cyclical dispute,
- shared memories instead of parallel silences.
The key is not to return to the 19th century, but to recover the strategic lesson that that century left unconsolidated: water as a space of memory, sovereignty and future projection.
