In Colombia's civil war, I swiftly learned how hard it is to find the truth,
Pools of blood by a river told of the murders of eight gold prospectors.
But minutes after the corpses had been airlifted out in a Colombian Army helicopter, everybody we met at the scene had a conflicting story about what had happened here.
They said the killers were rightwing paramilitaries hired by gold mining companies; or they were Marxist FARC guerrillas; or this was an ordinary crime perpetrated because of a row over business.
Before the blood had even dried, the truth had been distorted by conspiracy theories and paranoia.
All we knew was that Colombians had been brutally murdered.
Colombia's government, backed by billions of dollars from the USA, claims it has been restoring the rule of law in its policy of 'democratic security'.
But what producer Katie Churcher and I saw was a society in which impunity rules rather than the law.
We went to film how the conflict is affecting Colombia's indigenous peoples - the country's most impoverished and marginalised community.
International NGOs told us Colombia's 100 indigenous communities were under threat of 'extinction', targeted by powerful economic and political interests.
'This,' said one British aid worker thumping the table in Bogota, 'is just like the movie Avatar'.
We knew of course that it was never going to be as simple as a story of a private army of miners with American accents destroying the forests of nature-loving blue tribesmen.
And, as when indigenous people showed us photographs of a pile of toddler children executed with pistol shots to their heads - we realised it was a story with few heroes.
Indigenous people, we discovered, have been caught in the conflict for so long that despite wanting to stay neutral - in order just to survive, they have had to become deeply involved in the war.
In the mangrove estuaries of the Pacific coast, indigenous people told us they had been caught in the crossfire between armed groups - while the military claimed they were doing business with FARC insurgents.
The Awa people told us of massacres allegedly perpetrated by both FARC and the Army, but the authorities claimed the only suspects in one set of killings were from a criminal gang known as the 'Cockroaches'.
And while it was interesting to hear from a farmer standing among coca plants that raising the crop was part of an indigenous tradition and that the product was used in medicines, the fact is that he was selling to ruthless drug dealers who might kill him if a deal went wrong.
In Colombia, the presence of cocaine, money and guns never seemed far away. It looked to me that in their struggle for survival in a terrible conflict, indigenous peoples had sought any way they could to survive as they sit between vicious rival armed groups.
But by being associated with the drug trade, they had allowed the consequences of crime into their lives - and they were suffering for it.
And nothing in Colombia's war was as it first seemed.
In the forest one morning I woke to see a humming bird in the canopy above me, but below my hammock slung between trees I found a large red, hairy tarantula spider.
From an Army combat helicopter, the unbroken jungle below looked so calm - and yet the week before, a bullet had hit an officer sitting where I was now strapped in.
Next to me in the chopper, the gunner's eyes were hidden behind a black visor, but then I realised this fighting man was just a kid. When he smiled I saw he still had braces on his teeth.
In slick Powerpoint presentations, Army officers boasted of their kill and capture rates against FARC guerrillas and the drug traffickers - and how they had lessons for the Western coaltion in counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yet the indigenous civilians we spoke to were sullen in the presence of soldiers. They both feared and loathed the Bogota government - so the hearts and minds campaign is clearly failing.
Tens of thousands have been killed. Among war-torn nations of the world, only the conflict in Sudan has more displaced people than Colombia.
The suffering seems incredible, because I have rarely visited such a beautiful, potentially rich country with such compelling, friendly people.
