Victor Castell agrees to spend the summer with his mother in her native El Salvador. He has just graduated from college in the United States. It is 1989. El Salvador is convulsing in a brutal civil war that has waged for years between the right-wing military backed government funded by U.S. aid, and a populist insurgency. With influential family on both extremes of this political divide, Castell is drawn into the sphere of his left-leaning university professor uncle, an outspoken critic of the ruling regime. Here he meets Patricia Reyes and begins an intense love affair. Castell becomes personally caught up in the ugly realities of the civil war. Unknown to Castell, Reyes is involved with an anti-American terrorist group headed by the charismatic Santiago Molina. Circumstances entangle him within the murderous realm of international terrorism. That was twenty-five years ago. Living in California, Castell realizes the past was not buried deeply enough.