The film begins with the exhumation of four American women tortured, raped, and murdered by the right-wing government of El Salvador on December 2, 1980. The women -- Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline; Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Maryknoll mission sisters; and Jean Donovan, a young laywoman from Cleveland -- were providing food, shelter, medical care and burial to the poor. They were targeted for assassination by a death squad within the U.S.-supported Salvadoran military as part of a policy of suppressing the poor and "liberation theology." The award-winning documentary focuses primarily on the life of Jean Donovan through archival news footage, interviews, home movies, and diary readings. Neither dry nor doctrinaire, "Roses in December" is a painful, absorbing look at the consequences of the Reagan Administration's foreign policy and U.S. intervention in Central America, and how that policy instigated -- and then tried to whitewash -- the brutal deaths of the four American charity workers.