Original subtitles

Nothing was easy about going back to Columbia.

You could hike and bleed all day and cover just a couple miles.

It didn't really occur to us how dangerous it was.

Four soldiers just materialized out of the bush.

We're surrounded, and it's just crazy.

They were going to take me into the jungle and put a bullet in my head.

I was 21.

I went to the University of Colorado.

I really wasn't doing very well. I wanted to leave.

I was thinking about what I was going to do next.

I was from Colombia.

When I was very small, two months, I was adopted by an American couple, and it

occurred to me that I should go back to Colombia.

I think it's important for people that have grown up somewhere else to go back.

It would be an adventure.

I figured I would grow as a person, and then everything would make sense.

I had a road trip down from Colorado.

That was an important part of the trip, was to really get off the tourist track.

I wanted to go back to Columbia in a way that was meaningful to me.

I can fly or take a boat.

It was like...

Kung fu or something, this idea that I would be walking through Central

I felt there was some truth to this.

You can get on a road and you can take it all the way south, but it ends in

Panama, that's it.

But to cross into Colombia, you have to cross the Darien Gap.

The Darien is kind of mythical. It's jungle for hundreds of miles.

I had no idea what it would take to get across.

There was... any number of potential dangers there.

I would talk to travelers about the Darien. People talked about drug

and the guerrillas.

They said, crazy, it's a stupid idea.

Who gets kidnapped?

Or killed, either one.

I was a little nervous, but that certainly wasn't enough to dissuade me.

I thought it was an amazing opportunity to kind of prove something myself.

It's challenging, this idea to cross the Darien. Frightening.

But why should it be easy?

I bought a machete, a pair of tropical combat boots, a

small military backpack.

Didn't really want to carry much.

Bought a baby blue mosquito net.

It's a little comical. You know, how does one shop for a jungle adventure?

I was trying to shed my kind of American appearance.

I felt like it would be easier for me to kind of blend in.

I don't know if I did a very good job.

I look kind of like a bum, I think.

The last thing I needed before I left was a map.

Not a lot of people ask for a map of the Darien, obviously.

And I'm looking at what kind of maps are there.

And this guy walks in.

He goes to the same counter.

He asks about a map of the Darien.

This is kind of strange.

Now I'm just all ears. I'm curious.

He introduced himself.

He said he was a journalist.

The woman gave a set of aerial photographs.

They all looked the same. It was just green with these trees.

Wow, that's going to be a big help. You couldn't distinguish one from the other.

When were you thinking of going?

Next day or two. I think both of us were trying to figure out if it was a good

fit to go together, and so we agreed to meet up at his hotel.

Already I was thinking about if we were going to travel together, how this would

go.

I brought something out for my own. My plan was to kind of go unnoticed through

the Darien.

But he was traveling with another woman who was my age.

My friend Megan.

I'm like, you know, she's blonde and six feet tall.

At that point, I'm like, well, there's no way we're going to be sneaking

the Darien. We're just trying to figure out the best route.

I don't think Meg was so sure about me coming along, which is funny because I

kind of had my own concerns about them.

I think we were all a little interested in what we would encounter in the

Darien. We could run into some Colombian guerrillas in this area. Yeah, right,

the FARC. I knew about the FARC.

FARC stands for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

I was interested in what they were trying to do.

There were people that, in my 21 -year -old liberal arts mind, were taking

direct action.

I thought that they would change the way things were in Columbia.

Poverty.

Romantic. Freedom fighters.

Yeah.

There was a discussion about the potential of us being kidnapped.

But I had to get to Columbia, and I was going to do it this way. So how do you

feel about us all going together?

I said, yeah. Do it.

We got in the boat, and there we were, headed into the Darien.

There was really no thought to even if we belonged in that part of the world.

That didn't occur to us. It was our trip.

I didn't think there'd be any real severe consequences.

Anything that I was going to get into, I felt like I could kind of get out of. I

think we all felt that way.

We'd take all day to travel three or four miles.

But we were definitely on our way.

Robert had a GPS, but the GPS was tough in that part of the world.

We tried to get our maps to gel with the GPS.

We couldn't get the map to coordinate.

It became very clear that this type of journey was impossible without a guide.

We went upriver all day, and we arrived at a native village, Kapati.

At that time, we met Victor.

He saw us pull in.

Hello. Welcome.

Good morning. Mark.

I liked Victor right off.

He was really friendly.

Good morning, miss.

I am single.

Older, early 50s.

Victor kind of took us on a tour. We walked through the village. He showed us

his house.

We told Victor we were planning to cross the Darien into Colombia.

And that didn't seem like too big an issue for him.

He talked about his experience guiding in the past.

And he claimed to have contacts with the park, which was another relief. That's

one less of a reason to worry with a guide that has contacts with the park.

Great. What do you think?

Kind of won us over, you know.

But before we could leave Capati with Victor,

we had to meet with the Panamanian police.

Capati was the final outpost on the Panamanian side.

There was a little garrison on the edge of the Darien.

It was fortified.

They had sandbag placements, machine gun placements.

Clearly they were protecting that part of Panama from something.

We're going to have to somehow appease the police to let us through.

We began this kind of negotiation.

We asked to leave.

They told us it was too dangerous.

They had all sorts of stories about what they thought was in the Daria. They

mentioned drug trafficking, they mentioned the FARC.

And they sort of look to Victor and they look at me. Do you understand?

Sort of, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, guerrillas.

We said, we're not going to go far.

They weren't having it.

At that point, I was concerned that this was as far as it was going to go.

I thought maybe we were going to be back on the river, headed back the same way

we came.

I think this is the part where I began to trust Victor because he wasn't

to give up.

And so it went on all afternoon.

Finally, the commanding officer said that his commander was going to come and

was going to talk to us. All the soldiers grabbed their weapons and

me, go.

And they headed up to this hilltop.

And that was the commander in his helicopter just coming in low right over

canopy.

The helicopter landed.

Officer jumped out.

Blades are still spinning.

Shot it over. He asked who Mark was.

I was a Spanish speaker.

That's me.

And he was very brief. He said, Panamanian police cannot ensure your

this region of the Darien. Do you understand the risks involved?

I said, yes.

He said, okay.

Good luck.

And that was it. He took my hand, got back in the helicopter, and left.

We felt great.

Everything was back on track.

Frankly, I don't think there was anything they could have told us that

have really deterred us from continuing.

As it turned out, the Panamanian police were right, but not for the reason that

any of us expected.

No one really could have predicted what was going to happen next.

It's going to take about two hours to get to the next village.

Leaving Kapiti was phenomenal.

It was happening. It was really happening.

Victor negotiated a guide.

We had a young boy that was our guide to the next village.

Everybody was in a pretty good mood.

Robert shot some video of us leaving.

These are like three different rivers that come together.

The bridge.

We were on our way.

The first couple days were really rough for Robert.

He had, like, the exhaustion.

It was just really difficult keeping up fluids.

We were hiking between, like, 10 to 12 hours each day.

Portions of the trail were really slow. We had to cut through brush.

They weren't well -traveled.

We'd walk in riverbed for an hour, and then suddenly our guide would skirt off

on a very small, almost like a game trail that you'd never fought on your

We walked for almost 12 hours coming into Pucaro.

It was dusk, and we startled the people there.

It was just a really rare occurrence to have

people coming to the village.

These young men came out.

They had machetes.

It felt really hostile.

Yeah, I'm scared.

I'm scared.

I have no idea what they're going to do.

I don't know what's going to happen.

Are we going to be beat?

And it's just crazy.

They were in our faith.

There was dogs. Just unbelievable commotion.

We're uninvited. We're in the Darien. We've left the police outpost, and all

really have is victory.

All I could think, stay with Victor.

Stay with Victor.

If anyone's going to sort this out, Victor's going to sort it out.

Victor kept his calm, and he walked directly to the chief's home.

Obviously, they wanted to hear from us what we were doing there and what we

planning.

Victor negotiated with the tribe.

They gave us a cabin to stay in for the night.

From that point, I think the trip, it changed a little bit.

Now things are kind of coming into focus.

We are in the Darien now.

And things are going to only become... more unexpected.

It's not that we couldn't have turned around from there, but we limited our

options for ourselves.

It began to be, you know, not fun and games. Like, this is real.

The next day, Victor negotiated guides for us.

The plan was for the guides to take us as far as Paya, which was the last

Panamanian village.

In just a matter of days, we'd be inside Columbia.

I certainly didn't think that we'd put the most difficult part of the trek

behind us.

We had yet to enter the border region, the real heart of the jungle, if you

will.

We hiked all day through the jungle.

I remember Victor kind of laughing with the guides about the amount of water we

were drinking.

And then we did run out of water.

At first, it's like, wow, I'm really thirsty. I'd really like some water. And

then I really don't feel well, feel lightheaded. We need to find water soon.

Eventually,

we

find a grove of green bamboo.

They would hack off part of the tree, and then... cut off the top, and

have six, eight ounces of water stored in the tree.

It was like a tremendous relief.

We hiked all afternoon, and that afternoon we arrived in Paia.

Coming into Paia was much different than Pucuru because they were expecting it.

We made it to the last stop before you cross the border into Colombia.

That evening, we attended this tribal meeting.

I can remember there was a group of young men that were kind of dancing in

circles, playing their music, enjoying themselves.

We ate fish and then rice and some bushmeat, iguana.

We would eat what's served.

And it was good.

It was good.

By that time, things were moving along pretty well, and we were able to

negotiate with the chief for guides.

I couldn't believe where I was.

I felt incredibly fortunate.

I felt like I was doing what I set out to do.

We were there for a couple days.

Victor told us that that would be safer if we made contact with the FARC now

rather than later.

He told us that a local commander with the FARC would meet with us.

We spent a whole day. We just hung out.

But they never showed up.

If the FARC had showed up, that would have been a huge relief.

But that didn't happen, and the following day we left.

Leaving Paya, I knew we were close to Columbia.

We were probably about a day or a day and a half from the border.

Paya was our last village, and then beyond that, the really serious part

Hiking through the jungle is what you'd expect.

Everything is sharp and pointy or trying to eat you.

I had a compass, but you can't just pick a direction and walk east.

There's ravines and valleys.

You could hike and bushwhack and bleed all day and cover just a couple miles

not really be any farther than from where you started.

There'd be points where the guide would turn around and we'd go back the same

way we came.

Went off in another direction.

You don't have any line of sight and you're down under the canopy.

And you really don't have a sense even what direction you're walking.

What I noticed more than anything was this feeling that we were almost walking

in circles.

You'll pass a tree or some sort of feature of vegetation and you'll swear

already walked by it.

We camped at night and expected to be in Columbia the following day.

I slept in my hammock.

You kind of feel like a tuna in a net. I mean, it's just not very comfortable.

And it's warm and there's bugs.

All sorts of things going on at night. But it is loud.

I think gradually I was starting to feel fatigued. Not physically, but

emotionally I was beginning to feel tired.

Even in the times when things were going as well as they possibly could have.

There was always an underlying fear of where we were and what we were doing.

The next morning we woke up, we had breakfast.

Hey Robert, you all packed?

All packed.

What about your hammock?

And we continued. We knew that we were probably going to cross into Columbia

that day.

Right around noon we decided to stop for lunch.

And while we were eating, three men we knew from Paya passed us.

They were headed to the same village, and they were moving quite quickly. They

had heavy bags, but they were moving much faster than we were. We exchanged

pleasantries, and they were off. We knew we probably wouldn't see them again

until we got there.

So after lunch, we grabbed our stuff, and we got back underway.

And shortly after that, we were up on a ridge line.

It was open. There was a storm that had come in and knocked down a lot of the

trees, and we were kind of all picking our way through.

And it was at that point where we heard the gunshots.

We

heard

the gunshots.

They were pretty distinct.

Is that what I think it is?

They were farther up the valley, maybe a half mile or a mile away.

They were just low births of fire.

My heart's racing. I remember kind of having my own moment of anxiety, you

At that point, our guides simply said that they weren't going to continue.

And they dropped everything they were carrying, and they ran.

There was no discussion. They were going back to Paya. End of story.

In moments, they were gone, and Robert's gear and our food and everything were

just on the trail.

Mark, are you okay?

And that was Victor and Meg and Robert and myself.

Before we could really talk about what we wanted to do and what our plan was,

Two of the men that had passed us earlier in the day showed up.

One of them was bleeding, and they were completely terrified.

Apparently they'd been cutting bamboo, and people had just started shooting at

them. That's all they could say.

And then one of them sort of showed where the third man had been shot, that

they'd killed him.

And they continued back to Rupaya.

where our guides had just run off to.

I was trying to delay panic. You know, I figured there'd be time to panic later

on, but at this point we really just needed to figure out what we were going

do.

What do you think?

Do you think it's the FARC?

Seems likely, huh?

We didn't want to be trying to outrun them through the jungle. Their first

response would be to fire on anyone that was trying to move away from them.

You think we could make it back to Paya? And then Paya was two days away.

That meant a night in the jungle with...

Whoever else was out there. And those options didn't seem very appealing.

So what do you think?

I remember being quiet.

I remember not really saying much. I just kind of went back into myself.

This wasn't really my game.

Robert was the one that suggested... I think we keep going.

Toward the ambush.

It'll be safer than to, uh...

To turn back.

What about Victor?

We stayed together.

Mark, are you happy with that?

I'm scared.

But this was something I kind of hoped to encounter.

A true, true, true test.

Okay, so we're all agreed.

It was that important to me that I could deal with whatever it was down the

trail.

There was a lot of internal monologue.

I was thinking about the fact that maybe their first response was going to be to

open fire.

Robert suggested that we speak loudly so they would have ample warning before we

encountered whoever it was that had been shooting.

All right, where are we going, Victor?

Where are we going?

I was kind of reaching a bit of a breaking point.

Keep talking.

Louder. After maybe just 15 or 20 minutes, we made our way up to a bluff.

And Robert, I think, actually said, This would be a really good place for an

ambulance.

And four soldiers just materialized. They just stood up.

True hair. Young, probably all in their early 20s.

And I remember very distinctly that the soldier just directly in front of me had

a green bandana and a single blue feather right in the middle, kind of

Their arms pointed their guns at us. We had our hands up, and we took off our

bag, and then we sat down.

At that point, the soldiers were just immediately on their radios.

We were thinking they were the FARC.

Victor was the one with the FARC contact, and now we were going to fall

Victor's relationship and then also Robert as a journalist.

They wanted to kind of figure out who we were.

Robert had articles, and he kind of wanted to demonstrate to them that he

actually was a journalist.

But they weren't too interested in our story.

They started this casual conversation about tiger meat, tigre.

And they asked Victor if he'd ever had tigre.

Victor said, yeah, yeah, it's very rich, it's very rich. And they said, yeah,

yeah, yeah, we really like tigers.

They said, tigers eat tigers.

You know, predators eat predators.

From there, they went on to say that they'd just seen tiger.

In fact, they'd shot at one in the jungle.

And they kind of hinted at whether or not we'd heard the gunfire.

No, no, no.

No, no. We said no. We all had the good sense to keep our mouths shut.

After about an hour of waiting around, another group of soldiers arrived.

Now there was maybe 30 or 40 soldiers, like, right where we were.

We don't know what the hell is going on.

They separate us from Big Sur.

Victor was nervous from the beginning, and I could kind of see it on his face.

He was too far away to hear what he was saying, but he was talking to the squad

commander.

Eventually, Victor came back, and the squad commander launched

into this.

speech about the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the FARC.

They were members of the FARC. They were there to protect the people of

Colombia.

And we listened.

When he was done speaking, Victor started speaking to me in English.

He was trying to appear casual, but he was struggling.

He was really trying to pick his words carefully.

He told me they didn't trust him, and he

didn't know them, that he was worried.

At that point, I was really confused.

Victor didn't know who they were.

They claimed they were FARC, but they were making up stories about shooting in

the jungle.

They haven't killed us, that's good, but it was another story now.

How are we going to get out of this?

They wanted to see our maps, and they had some questions about Paya and who

there and what was there.

They decided that they were going into Panama for themselves, but they needed a

guide to retrace our steps.

What did he say?

He said they want to take Victor with them to Panama.

There was a brief argument.

We were pretty emphatic about it, but Victor didn't really say much of

on his behalf.

I think at that point he realized that things were beyond his control.

I mean, we really pleaded with him, but they assured us, they said, it's not to

worry, we're just going to secure the area.

The situation that I put myself in.

Decision after decision led me to this point of running into the park.

This is almost exactly what I thought might happen. Did I not realize the

seriousness of this?

I was really worried.

I was convinced Victor was probably dead.

We more or less stayed.

put right where we were.

They put us right in the middle of this group of soldiers, maybe 20, so we slept

surrounded.

No one was going to sneak off in the middle of the night.

And I don't remember sleeping a lot that night.

The soldiers, they would pull guard duty all night.

Every couple hours, four or five soldiers would get up and go in and take

and four or five more would come back.

I don't know what they wanted.

I don't know what we would do if we were permanently held.

To be so foolish as to just stumble across a border the way we did.

Our ability to make choices ended once we walked down the trail.

In the morning, they moved us.

It was very warm, and there was a particular smell in the area.

It could have been anything, but it smelled like

death.

It's something that happened at that location.

The two men that had run back and the third that had been killed, we saw their

things. They were just kind of torn open, stewing apart.

His body wasn't there. It was just the bags that the men had been carrying.

But it felt like a body.

Their things felt like a body.

At that point, we were kind of with this small group of soldiers, kind of made a

camp there in the jungle, and we just waited.

So I'm thinking, okay, so this is the FARC, the left wing, you know, the

fighters. They were young, really young.

Kids, really.

16, 17, 18 years old.

I wasn't an expert about the FARC, but I had some pretty pointed questions, kind

of philosophical stuff.

But any conversation that I tried to engage them with, it didn't go anywhere.

They were curious about Robert's iPod. They wanted to talk about music.

They wanted to talk about their families.

At night, they were kind of jumpy, and I think that just comes with being in the

jungle for as long as they've been.

It was just on the edge of darkness. I became aware of this really distinct

noise.

And I asked if anyone else heard it. It was distant, but it was

low.

It kept building in intensity over the span of maybe four or five minutes.

The soldiers started to become alarmed because it continued to get louder and

louder and louder.

Was that a helicopter?

We're thinking maybe it was a helicopter, but the sound was becoming

complex.

There was this kind of clicking, almost like a metallic sound.

Now the soldiers are totally spooked, and their little squad leader is telling

them to take position, and they don't want to go.

We're all like, what do you think it is? Robert looks at us, and he says, Sounds

like a column of men coming toward us. And I listen, and it's just right there.

Yeah.

Of course, it's a massive amount of soldiers running toward us through the

forest.

And then the noise just rose to a level where the soldiers just opened up.

Robert, like, get as far away from the muzzle blast as possible.

I have a very clear memory of trying to literally, like, bury my head in a

jungle.

And it keeps firing, and there's just silence.

Just complete silence.

And then someone says, it's pigs, wild pigs.

And that's exactly what it was.

The days continued to come and go.

It became fatiguing. It was kind of wearing on my psyche.

It became more and more serious.

because we weren't getting handed over.

We would hear helicopters, you know, Blackhawks had like a really distinct

to them, kind of real low, throaty.

We'd all kind of look at it, but it's impossible for them to see us.

We were certainly kind of under guard, but we weren't restrained.

Our hands were never bound.

We also really didn't talk about escaping. That was a step that I don't

were prepared to even think about.

There was opportunities.

They were kind of careless with their weapons. They didn't leave them around.

Sometimes they'd forget them.

But then once you escape, where do you go?

We didn't have provisions on us. Then we really would have been on our own.

Frankly, we didn't have a lot of our own survival skills.

Then, that evening, another group of soldiers arrived.

They were the soldiers that went into Panama.

They had heavier mortars, Russian squad machine guns.

The commander that originally took Victor reassures us that Victor is going

be coming along any minute.

It's a man. All of our electronic equipment.

They took our media, our passports.

Everything we had.

The level of anxiety, it's gradually building.

Like, grab your bag, get your stuff, we need to leave.

As we were climbing out of this ridgeline, Robert and I began this

which was basically, how do we really know these people are who they say they

are?

We thought if we were going to run into somebody, it would be the part.

But I remember Victor was nervous from the beginning that he didn't really know

who they were.

When he left, he was really quiet.

I'm certain he feared for his life.

It's possible he was thinking they were the sworn enemy of the FARC

paramilitaries.

I knew there were rumors about them using chainsaws on people.

I was familiar with the paramilitaries, the right wing, death squad.

I was aware that their tactics were horrifying.

They wanted support in the rural areas, and they were willing to do anything to

get that.

It was pretty rare that paramilitaries would take people and then release them.

Now I have no idea what was going to happen next.

We hiked all night.

Moving at night, you just follow the soldier in front of you.

You can't see anything.

Just pitch black dark.

Nobody can use a flashlight because there was potential to run into other

groups.

It just feels like it's never going to end.

Finally, We arrived at the village that was kind of our original destination in

Columbia.

We come out onto this really large soccer field, and there's dozens of

already sacked out on the field, and we just crashed.

We're all beyond words, just so fatigued.

I don't remember sleeping. I must have.

But just a couple hours later, 4 or 5 in the morning, the soldier woke me up.

There was about six soldiers.

I didn't recognize any of them.

These guys were older.

They meant business, and they told us to get up.

Of course, at that point, it's just like, what, are you kidding me? Like, we

hiked all night. We've only slept for a couple hours, and we're moving again.

I'm waking up now, and I'm kind of realizing that this isn't probably the

situation.

I don't know these guys.

They're not the soldiers that we kind of had a relationship with.

It just becomes apparent. For whatever reason, they don't want us to be seen by

anybody in the village.

At this point, I'm consciously fearful for my life.

They take us to a graveyard, to the Kuna burial site. It's outside the village.

I look at Megan. I'm just like, what do you think?

And Meg has this kind of, like, way of putting things. She's like, I don't

She's like, I think they're going to do it.

I'm like, really?

I think you're right.

Like, that's exactly how I feel. I mean, like, is this it? Is it how it's going

to go down?

And she's like, I don't know. That's what it feels like.

I was like, now I know what's going to happen. They're going to kill us.

They kept telling us they were going to release us, and they never did. We've

been in the jungle days.

And now we're in a graveyard.

They took our media.

So there's no evidence now.

They have everything. They have us.

We're going to be shot.

So we waited.

And four or five soldiers showed up, and they took me.

by myself.

And Meg was just like...

She just said goodbye to me.

They both said goodbye to me.

It was... I went with them. I left.

Now I know what's going to happen. They're going to kill us.

I don't know why, but they're going to kill us.

I kind of gave up at that point.

I feel kind of, in a weird way, ready. I mean, maybe this is how it should have

been. I mean, I'm back in Columbia, right?

Things have kind of come around, you know?

You always think you try to run, grab a weapon or something.

But oddly enough, that wasn't on my mind.

I just figured that they were going to take me into the jungle and put me on my

knees and put a bullet in my head.

They took me out onto the riverbank. Most of the entire guerrilla detachment

right there.

And another superior had showed up.

And they sat me down, like, right in the middle.

And now it's just like, well, what's going to happen next?

The commander offered me a cigarette, and we start this conversation about

politics.

He wants to know what I think about the paramilitary.

Pretty certain they're not the FARC anymore.

I told him what I thought about them.

I figured if they wanted to shoot me, they could shoot me.

I told him that the paramilitary was probably the biggest problem in Colombia

that time.

the assassinations and the murders and the massacres.

I just sort of gave him a piece of my mind.

I think I probably was ranting.

And partway through the rant, this commander kind of interrupts me

and pulls off his T -shirt

and like, there it is.

We're paramilitary.

Let's go on crossbones with kind of their little tag. What do you think

that?

He said, I'd take the cigarette now.

I'd just run my mouth off.

That was a big joke.

It became clear that they'd gotten instruction to play along with his fart

storyline.

And the joke really was on me, but I laughed too.

Once everybody kind of laughed at me, I kind of became convinced that they

thought we were completely harmless.

Robert and Meg were down the riverbank when they saw me.

They were surprised to see me alive.

Tell us that we can go.

I almost couldn't believe it.

The next day, there were some people here to pick us up.

We thought it was going to be the Red Cross, but it was a Colombian priest and

nun from a convent.

I hadn't really gotten time to really think about what had happened.

I was still wound up.

It was just a huge continuum of emotion. It was like dread and then relief.

I felt like there was going to be a point where I would have to kind of dump

of the stress and anxiety I was feeling.

But at that point, I was hanging in there, I think.

I was hanging in there.

We were out of the jungle, and we were definitely in Columbia.

The U .S. Embassy sent the jet for us.

And then, same day, they fly us to Bogota.

They sit us right down in office, and they're just all ears.

They want to know everything.

At that point, the cracks are starting.

I was starting to feel burnout.

And there were a lot of questions about Victor.

Where did you meet him?

There are questions about how we met him. He's one of the locals in Kapati.

What he'd done in certain situations.

You okay?

You haven't heard what happened?

It was then that we got the full story about what had happened after Victor

with the paramilitary.

They got Victor to lead them back into Panama.

And when they got to Paya, there was kind of a celebration underway.

For whatever reason, they didn't like the cooperation they were getting.

The chief was killed by the paramilitaries.

His son was left for dead.

From there, they left Paya, and they went even deeper into Panama, all the

to Pucuru.

I'm guessing if Victor wasn't convinced before that he was a dead man, he's

absolutely convinced now.

So, Victor escapes.

Somewhere between Paya and Pukuru, there's like a 50 -year -old man trying

outrun an entire squad of hardened, trained paramilitary soldiers in the

jungle. And he outruns them.

Warns the village. And by the time the paramilitary show up, the village is

empty. They looted.

Burned a couple of the buildings to the ground and left. We burned a couple of

buildings to the ground and left.

They took what they wanted.

When I heard about what happened, I blamed myself.

This was an act of terrorism.

It was the first paramilitary incursion into Panama.

Our guides were from Paya.

There had been people killed.

I mean, everything kind of fell away.

The room started spinning.

I just felt suddenly really horrible.

I could just feel a fever coming on, and they asked me, are you okay?

I'm like, no.

I need to lie down.

They sat me down, and this

nurse came in. She just said, what happened to you?

I completely lost it.

I just cried. It felt really good.

I couldn't explain to her what had happened to me because I didn't know

happened to me.

but I'd made it to where I wanted to be.

I was back in Columbia.

That in itself was kind of overwhelming.

Literally, I just had this day in Bogota, and that was it.

I got a cab, and I went to a central park in the middle of the city.

I walked, I sat on a bench.

I had more questions sitting on that bench than I did when I left.

There had been people killed.

And maybe it was our fault.

Whether or not the paramilitaries would have gone into Panama without us is up

for argument, but I felt responsible for what happened.

Even eight years later, I still think about it. I still think about the

I made to take that trip.

I'd gotten this idea in my head.

That I would personally pay any cost to cross the Darien.

But in the end, I didn't have to pay it, really.

Other people paid for it.