(narrative-literary tone with documentary undertones)
- The San Juan River, liquid frontier and strategic artery of the Central American isthmus, roars as a lifeline between Costa Rica and the ambitions of William Walker, the American adventurer who intends to establish a slave republic in Nicaragua to project himself to the rest of the continent. While the world watches California, steamships and merchandise cross the Transit Route, unaware that the war for the future is being waged upriver.
In San José, President Juan Rafael Mora summons the defense. But the novel departs from the political salons and descends into the humidity, fever and mud: there where Major Máximo Blanco Rodríguez, veteran of previous campaigns and owner of a silent temper, receives the command of the Vanguard Column. With barely two hundred men, few provisions and an imperfect map, Blanco sets out on the march from the Central Valley to the Atlantic thicket, accompanied by Francisco Alvarado, obsessive naval strategist; Emilie Hanke, European nurse moved by compassion without a flag; Francisco Quirós, major officer whose loyalty must be sustained in a fragile balance between duty and conscience; and an anonymous troop carrying corroded rifles, nostalgia, fear and hope.
What follows is not a glorious campaign in marble, but a journey of flesh:
mud that sucks boots, yellow fever that kills more than bullets, skinny oxen dragging cannons, soldiers carrying unanswered letters, dreams of return and silences shared in the trench.
The jungle is not a stage: it is an adversary.
Already in La Trinidad, the first river bastion, Blanco confronts the filibusters with a bold tactic: attack logistics, not rhetoric. In rapid night operations and maneuvers on improvised canoes and champagnes, he captures three filibuster steamers, breaks the security of the river and forces Walker to look back. What seemed an impossible campaign became an offensive that turned the war upside down: he who dominates the river, dominates the inter-oceanic route.
The novel then moves up to El Castillo and San Carlos, where the Costa Rican troops, exhausted but firm, take key positions and establish a blockade that suffocates the invaders. Nine steamers captured.
It is the most strategic victory of the campaign; a real feat recorded in diaries, military reports, diplomatic chronicles… and that nevertheless would be submerged in silence.
Because as Blanco advances, San José retreats: they celebrate the triumphs, but restrict ammunition, supplies and reinforcements. Political rivalries and fear of Blanco’s prestige weigh as much as wet gunpowder. In La Trinidad, surrounded by jungle, filibusters and diseases, the major faces the dilemma that will mark his destiny: abandon the position to save his men. Not out of cowardice, but because war-without bread, bullets and ships-is abandonment disguised as order.
The silent return of the Column will not be celebrated.
Victory will remain, but not recognition.
The last chapters turn to the fog of memory: while the country celebrates Santa Rosa and Rivas, the river campaign is relegated, then omitted, finally forgotten.
Blanco becomes an uncomfortable shadow, his name erased from the bronze, his feat relegated to footnotes that nobody reads. And yet, the river – the book’s silent character – remembers: it keeps in its backwaters the rotting uniforms, the unspoken names, the contradictory orders, the unaddressed letters and the echo of a retreat that was also survival.
In the epilogue, the novel unveils the question that beats on every page:
what does it mean for a country to silence the feat that founded its river defense?
The answer is not a sentence, but an invitation: memory is not archeology; it is strategic orientation.
The Bitter Waters of the San Juan does not seek to consecrate heroes or condemn villains; it seeks to narrate the human and strategic truth of a campaign that changed history and then disappeared from the national narrative.
Its strength lies in the diaries, in the humidity, in the silences -and in the river, which it never forgot.
