Full of Arriaga's trademark humor and irony present in his films and novels, The Guillotine Squad takes us back to one of the most exciting times in Mexican history. Feliciano Velasco y Borbolla de la Fuente, a lawyer, sells his famous invention, the guillotine, to Pancho Villa, the renowned insurgent general of the Mexican Revolution. Soon Feliciano finds himself immersed in the logic of this simultaneously bizarre, heroic, and cruel world of Villa's troops.