John Perkins spent years as a self-described "economic hit man," using inflated financial forecasts, rigged elections, bribery, and the threat of coups to lock developing nations into debt that served American corporate and government interests. The film mixes archival material with film-noir-style reenactments and Perkins' own on-camera confessions, drawn from his books "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" and "The Secret History of the American Empire." It traces his growing guilt after meeting the daughter of an assassinated president, a meeting that pushes him toward going public. The film builds to Perkins addressing an angry Latin American audience directly, naming the mechanisms he once used against their countries. Along the way it connects his account to broader claims about the roots of anti-American resentment abroad and the persistence of poverty in nations tied to foreign debt. The tone is confessional rather than triumphant: a man describing a system he helped build and the specific human costs he says it left behind.