When members of the Peruvian Maoist revolutionary-terrorist group the Shining Path were captured and imprisoned, the authorities isolated them in their own cellblocks. The guerrillas thought of government prisons as just another front in the People's War calling them "shining trenches of combat." The prisoners organized propaganda, literature, and military classes as well as marches, criticism sessions and dances. The Shining Path was known to recruit heavily among highland Indians and women. Structured roughly along the pace and schedule of a Catholic mass, the film is filled with the esoteric rituals and dogmatic political theology of their leader, the former philosophy professor Chairman Gonzalo.