Michael Hutchison's career as a writer had an unexpectedly adventurous beginning. Under contract to write a book about Central America in the 1970s, he took up residence in the ancient home of an owner of a coffee finca, long abandoned. He arrived in Guatemala to find out that revolutions were taking place throughout the entire peninsula of Central America. In Guatemala, the ruling dictator's troops, secretly armed by American forces led by the CIA, were pursuing a program of systematically murdering entire villages of the native Mayan peoples. He himself was picked up by one of these feared "death squads",lined up with their knees on the edge of the cliff and their hands tied behind their backs with electrical cord, along with hundreds of other Mayan villagers. The death squads walked down the line systematically shooting each man, woman and child in the back of the head, after which they fell into the ravine. Hutchison was able to escape, but he found that this kind of systematic genocide was happening all over Guatemala, with hundreds of thousands of Mayan Indians being murdered for no reason except that they may have sympathy for the revolutionary forces. This happened to Hutchison again in Guatemala, and then again in El Salvador, then in Nicaragua.