Spain, 1937. Ramón Mercader, a young communist combatant, is recruited and trained by the Soviet intelligence service to participate in a top secret mission ordered by the ruthless dictator Joseph Stalin: the assassination of his former political rival, Leon Trotsky, who is living in exile in Mexico.
An unworldly and closed-minded American travels to a small village in exotic Chiapas, Mexico; at the behest of his estranged mother when his half-sister disappears during a local epidemic of kidnappings attributed to the legendary J-ok'el, the weeping woman, who drowned her own babies, centuries ago and whose spirit has returned to claim more children as her own.