Right-wing paramilitary violence in Haiti is Sprague's subject, and his case is that it has worked steadily against the democratic hopes of ordinary Haitians.

He begins in 1990, the year Jean-Bertrand Aristide became Haiti's first democratically elected president, and traces the reactionary movements that succeeded in forcing him from office. Over the two decades that followed, the violence fell mainly on the poor and on people aligned with Aristide's Lavalas movement, and it cost thousands of Haitian lives.