Hampton was inspired to write this play by the article "Genocide", written by journalist Norman Lewis and published in The Sunday Times Colour Magazine on 23 February 1969.
[citation needed] Four years after the military coup d'état, a guerrilla movement developed under the leadership of Carlos Marighella of the A.L.N (Ação Libertadora Nacional).
In 1969 and 1970, the ALN kidnapped various ambassadors and embassy officials from the USA, Japan, West Germany, and Switzerland in order to exchange them for the release of hundreds and thousands of political prisoners.
He tries to make his hostage understand the ideas behind the revolutionary movement, reads their manifesto to him, and says that the corrupt government must be punished for "selling our country to the interests of US capitalism, which it has allowed to exploit our resources and steal our land, while our people starve and suffer all the miseries of poverty and unemployment".
They were being murdered by gifts of poisoned sugar, introduced infectious disease, and outright slaughter financed by greedy land owners and speculators, both foreign and domestic.
The play also criticises missionaries; Reverend Elmer Penn is portrayed as treating "his flock" of converted Indians like domesticated animals not fit to think for themselves.