Cattle-rancher Maria Lopez's letters weave a vast web that encompasses Buenos Aires and Chubut, Washington and Madrid, Geneva, London and Moscow. Family members, government officials, military men, lawyers, spies, men or women, they all serve the tenacious landowner's objective: to reconstruct Argentine power. The last representative of an elite that neither persevered nor was replaced, Maria Lopez offers her bare-bones portrait of a woman and a patriot. This deeply political novel goes to the heart of the essential issue of the 1980s: the formation of a new national leadership.