In 1986, after Guatemala's newly elected government vowed to end military abuses and called on the country's hundreds of thousands of expatriate refugees to return home, the filmmakers visited the "new" Guatemala to search for the family of a refugee in Mexico. They filmed "model villages" and "reeducation camps" - settlements built by the army to control the rural population - and showed these scenes to the refugees in Mexico. Their comments, intercut with the footage, provide a unique perspective on modern Guatemala.