Alsino, Alan Esquivel, a 10- to 12-year-old boy, lives with his grandmother Carmen Bunster in a remote area of Nicaragua. Trying to be like any other child, he climbs trees with a friend and dreams of flying, convinced that the word Amsterdam holds the magic that will lift him into the sky.
The region lies in the final stages of a brutal civil conflict between Sandinista rebels and government troops. An American military advisor, Alejandro Parodi, arrives in the community to establish a preparation camp and to prevent direct attacks in the so-called “red zones.” He invites Alsino to climb into his helicopter, El Cóndor, and take him on a flight, though the boy remains stubbornly hopeful about flying on his own terms. > "I want to fly but without help."
When Alsino attempts another leap at flight, he falls from a tall tree, dislocating his shoulder and neck and leaving him with a permanent hunch. While he heals, he begins to sense “noises” inside him that seem to presage trouble back home. At his grandmother’s insistence, he goes down to the nearby town to sell a saddle inherited from his disappeared grandfather, a figure possibly tied to the Dutch navy in 1942. There, he experiences his first drink of rum and is taken to a brothel, where he speaks little and focuses on one girl, all of it unfolding amid the wartime chaos.
As violence intensifies, Alsino witnesses the cruelties that military forces mete out to those suspected of insurgent ties. In these raids he encounters several people who awaken a longing for freedom and a growing sympathy for the Sandinista rebels. When they eventually locate him hiding in the mountains, the group’s leader, Alejandro Parodi, offers to accompany and protect him on the journey.
Following news of his grandmother’s death and the collapse of “Operation Cóndor,” whose helicopter is bayoneted and shot down, Alsino chooses to join the guerrilla ranks, becoming fully immersed in the conflict and the struggle surrounding him. He forms bonds with those who guide him toward a broader sense of liberty, even as the war intensifies around him, painting a grave and moving portrait of a boy drawn into a larger fight. Along the way, he crosses paths with Don Nazario, the Birdman, Reynaldo Miravalles, and Lucia Lucia as well as Lucia's Grandfather Marcelo Gaete, weaving a hard-edged, human-scale tale of courage, loss, and the cost of freedom.
