Cruz de olvido

Carlos Cortés

2 ideas

1. Journalist returns to San José's hidden dead

   A journalist comes back to San José from revolutionary Nicaragua, where political violence was open and declared. At home he finds bodies and killings the city has buried, both literally and in collective memory, beneath its image as a peaceful, exceptional democracy. The novel uses his investigation to test whether Costa Rica's national self-portrait can survive contact with what it has chosen not to see.

2. Exceptionalism myths require organized forgetting to survive

   A national identity built on being uniquely peaceful and democratic can persist only if contrary evidence is actively forgotten, not merely overlooked. Forgetting becomes a civic duty: remembering the dead is treated as disloyalty to the nation's story. The myth is therefore sustained less by facts than by a shared agreement about what must not be mentioned.

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