American political consultants from Greenberg Carville Shrum arrive in Bolivia in 2002 to run the presidential campaign of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, a former president trying to reclaim office despite polling near the bottom of the field. Cameras sit in on the strategy sessions, the media training, and the drafting of attack ads, catching the consultants debating how to sell a candidate voters already associate with painful economic reforms. Their solution is to manufacture a sense of crisis and position their man as the only leader tough enough to handle it, a message that works well enough to win the election by a narrow margin. The film then follows the aftermath: Sánchez de Lozada's government collapses within a year amid gas riots and mass protests, and he flees the country. Interviews with the strategists, including moments of visible discomfort about their own tactics, sit alongside footage of the demonstrations their winning campaign eventually provoked, tracing a straight line from a boardroom in the United States to unrest in the streets of La Paz.