A portrayal of the troubled countries of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador & Nicaragua, as the author travels through them by train & bus. The author shows daily lives lived against a backdrop of continued & seemingly endless political friction & conflicts, in places that exhibit the contradictions inherent in an area of which Porfirio Diaz said: ” Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States”. It is an observation that serves as an epigraph to the book, as a means of showing how fervent Catholicism can live side by side with extreme violence, how people can show alternating friendliness & suspicion towards strangers, & how the attitudes with which Central America & the United States regard one another can be a mixture of both fear & longing.