Even in Mexico, where stories of massacres, kidnappings and clandestine graves provide daily news fodder, the recent revelations in western Jalisco state have caused a commotion.
Gruesome online images from a ranch apparently once used as a drug cartel training camp show hundreds of discarded shoes, backpacks, pants, shirts and other items, along with pictures of charred bones, bullet casings and clips from high-powered rifles.
Among the handwritten entries found in a notebook were numbered columns of nicknames – purportedly a coded ledger of ex-captives – and a farewell letter from someone that read: “My Love if Some day I don’t Return I only ask you to remember how much I Love you”.
Inside one cinder-block building at the ranch was a candle-bedecked shrine to Santa Muerte (Holy Death), a female folk saint whose cult is often associated with Mexican organised crime.
Disseminating the disturbing images on social media this month were members of a search group that entered the ranch seeking missing loved ones among Mexico’s more than 120,000 “disappeared”. Even the veteran searchers – accustomed to violence, threats and secret graves – were aghast.