"I'm a foreign journalist in Mexico. I wouldn't know the truth if it jumped out of its dark hiding place and pistol whipped me." All young Dan Goldstein wants to do is write decent stories for Mexico City's only English-language newspaper. He has ample material with the assassinations, earthquakes, currency-crashes and riots the country suffers as 1994 becomes one of the most chaotic years in Mexico's history. But Dan plunges into a series of gut-wrenching events whose larger meaning he can barely comprehend. His lunatic editors impede his every move. His fellow reporters help as much as possible for an insane group of intoxicated eccentrics. But they're also disappearing one by one, each a victim of personal disintegration and Mexico's violent decline. When Dan finally closes in on truth, he must decide if discovery if worth risking his life and his sanity.