Among the Emberá people of Colombia, almost nobody uses the word “suicide.” Instead, loved ones speak of jais, the native word for “spirits.” The Emberá are a large Indigenous community living in remote villages along the country’s west coast, a region plagued by acute poverty and violence from armed groups that are vying for drug-trafficking routes. “The jais are taking our children away,” one member of the community told Santiago Mesa, a Colombian photographer who has been documenting the surge of Emberá youth suicides in recent years. The jais are believed to be malign forces that appear mostly at night, taking over their victims’ consciousness and forcing them to end their lives. Mesa, a native of Medellín, visited the Emberá in mid-2024, not long after a sixteen-year-old named Yadira Birry hanged herself at her school using a traditional paruma, a large, colorful piece of cloth that women use as long skirts.

The girl’s mother, Miralba Birry, told Mesa, “Before Yadira killed herself, people in our community didn’t think much about that.” But soon after Yadira’s death ten more members in her village, a community of only a hundred and forty-one people, also attempted to kill themselves using parumas. One of them was Luisa, Yadira’s older sister. The girl mentioned to Mesa that she had been seeing Yadira in her dreams, beckoning her to the other side. “Yadira tells me she’s doing O.K., but she never lets me see her face,” Luisa said. Her mother took her to a jaibaná, a traditional priest, who tried to keep the jais at bay with smoke and prayers. “My daughter’s case was part of that same illness,” Miralba said.

Mesa’s photo series, titled “Jaidë,” or “House of Spirits,” conjures the mystical outlook of the women he met, using an ethereal yellow-and-orange palette to portray the grieving. An overexposed photo shows Miralba from the torso up, looking into a white sky, with a ray of light almost sanctifying her face. Another picture shows three of the Birry sisters wearing their red-and-blue parumas on their heads, lingering like ghosts around Yadira’s grave. For another shot, Mesa asked Yadira’s family to stand in front of lighted candles one evening, in the classroom where she died.

“By then, the local authorities were very worried about it happening so often,” Mesa told me. “They had never witnessed something like this at this scale.” The Emberá elders say that they have been noticing a rise in suicide attempts since around 2015. According to UNICEF, the annual suicide rate among the Emberá is some five hundred cases per hundred thousand people, nearly a hundred times higher than the rate among Colombians at large. Yet the phenomenon is hard to track in the remote villages where the Emberá live, not just because most can be reached only by boat, and have little phone service, but also because of the taboo around the topic.

In the municipality of Bojayá, an Emberá man named José Luis Dogirama Sanapi is keeping his own record, in a notebook listing the names of the hundred and twelve people who have died by suicide in the past ten years, plus the four hundred and twenty-three who have attempted to kill themselves. He became interested in the subject because of his own past yearning for death, which he came to understand as a result of the never-ending violence plaguing his ancestral land. “In 1997, a guerrilla group forcibly recruited me into their ranks,” Sanapi told me by phone. “I lost eight years of my life in a living hell, and when I came back home I was completely traumatized.” He eventually found solace working with a local church.

Mesa, too, pursued his photography project, in part, because he’d has his own struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts. His mental health stabilized with the help of therapy and S.S.R.I.s. “Fifteen days after taking the medicine, I no longer felt cramps in my feet, no longer had mental fog,” he recalled. Enjoying a clear mind, he started to pay more attention to the tragic and puzzling news of suicides coming out of the Emberá territories. “Jaidë” wasn’t the first time that Mesa had felt compelled to chase death with a camera. He now lives in Bogotá but had previously worked for a tabloid in his home town of Medellín, where he’d often photograph the bodies of people who had been killed by hit men, or sicarios, a crime that is still common in a city that once was ruled by Pablo Escobar. “I needed to do something different after that work, something far away from classic photojournalism, something less explicit and more dreamlike,” Mesa said.

He discovered that most of those dying by suicide among the Emberá were women, and that there were common forces behind their despair. One was domestic violence. In the rain forest, Mesa met a mother of three kids who had attempted suicide in 2023. She did not hesitate to identify her husband as the main reason behind her wish to die. “I just couldn’t take his abuse anymore,” she said. (Having survived the suicide attempt, the woman remains married to the same man; divorce in the Emberá community is considered out of the question.) Often, the hostilities that women described facing were both personal and societal. Before making his first trip to the Pacific Coast, Mesa met two trans Emberá women living in Bogotá, who had attempted to die by suicide while living in crowded shelters for homeless Emberá. “They had left their land because of violence among guerrillas and paramilitaries,” Mesa said. “They survive in absolute poverty, and their families reject them for being trans. How much harder could life get?” In “Jaidë,” one of them, Ahitana, poses for a photo while looking down at the floor of a shelter, her expression defeated, her face barely illuminated by a small ray of light.

Mesa told me, “I am not sure this crisis can be fixed with a medical visit to these remote areas, because there is something more structurally wrong there, a strong feeling that you’re not part of a society.” When he visited the Emberá, several armed groups had imposed a curfew, and villagers could leave their homes only in the morning, to farm. “Some people say that their lands have been cursed by the armed conflict, that the spirits of those killed are the ones that haunt the young ones who then want to commit suicide.”

Mesa’s goal was to capture that haunting, and no photograph does so more vividly than one of Luisa Ignacia Chamorro, a young woman who had tried to hang herself seven days before their meeting. It was her second attempt. She spoke a bit about the jais, but then she cut the conversation short and allowed Mesa to follow her as she cropped the grass in front of her home. His image shows her kneeling with her face turned away from the camera. Rain falls around her. She grips a machete in one hand and holds it across her body, preparing to bring it slashing toward the ground.