John Pilger travels through Nicaragua four years after the Sandinistas overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, a regime that had ruled with US backing for decades. Pilger films the country building schools, clinics, and cooperatives in the revolution's aftermath, tracing the Sandinistas' program back to ideas borrowed from the English Co-operative Movement rather than Soviet doctrine. He sets this reconstruction against the Reagan administration's response: funding, training, and arming the Contra forces fighting to unseat the new government, and mining Nicaraguan harbors. Interviews with officials, farmers, and townspeople lay out what daily life under the new order looks like, from land redistribution to literacy campaigns, while Pilger argues that Washington's real objection was not communism but precedent, a small country demonstrating that a fairer alternative to US-backed dictatorship could actually work. The film ends without resolution, since the Contra war was still active, and stakes the country's fate on whether the model on screen survives outside pressure long enough to prove its point.