Made in 1997, John Sayles declared that Men With Guns is a piece not necessarily about current events, but rather about what has always been happening in Latin America.

The idea of ignorance of what the government is doing was a driving force behind Sayles making the film, questioning how much is willful ignorance rather than innocence.

As the main character gains knowledge about his own country, the movie seems to delcare that there is a steep price for innocence.

Summary: Men With Guns is set in no specific place, beyond that of some Latin American country, and no specific time, though the daily acoutrements of life seem to indicate that it's current. In this vague place is Dr. Fuentes, a doctor in the big city, who has recently lost his wife, and is contemplating vacation, and life, without her.

Rather than spend his vacation at the shore, where he always spent them with his wife, he chooses to forge into the wilderness of his country to find his students, young people he'd educated and sent out to help the less-fortunate Indian population. Almost immediatly he finds that life is not as he'd expected, but far more dangerous and far more brutal. The young doctors who were to have been his legacy have almost all been cruelly killed by the men with guns.

Dr. Fuentes continues to forge on, driven to know what happened to each student, and finding out more horrible details about the current state of affairs of his country as he does so. He meets up with an ex-soldier, an ex-priest, an abandoned boy and a girl who's been victimized to the point that she no longer speaks, and his eyes are opened.