Even in a country used to almost daily headlines about kidnappings, and grisly discoveries, the images have left people in shock. One photo shows . In another lie piles of clothes, jewellery and suitcases.

Even more chilling are the pictures of charred bones, skulls, fingers and teeth. And the heartbreaking farewell letter that reads: “My love, if some day I don’t return, I only ask you to remember how much I love you.”

The disturbing pictures posted online last weekend are from a which police believe was once used as a training camp for one of the country’s most powerful drug cartels. But the abandoned Rancho Izaguirre in Teuchitian, in the western state of Jalisco, hid an even more horrifying secret - as an extermination camp, where it is believed hundreds of young people met their deaths.

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Last week a private volunteer group looking for missing family members, entered the abandoned two-acre site and came across evidence of mass murder. As well as the piles of clothes and belongings, they also uncovered underground cremation furnaces, which they believe were used to incinerate the bodies of victims.

And by inserting metal rods into the earth to detect the stench of decomposing bodies, they say they have found mass graves where an untold number of victims are buried.

Macabre video footage showing searchers walking through the walled property, which was owned by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel - a criminal gang known for its extreme violence - has caused outrage in the country where more than 120,000 have been reported missing.

Newspaper headlines have dubbed the ranch a “secret extermination camp” and even the “Mexican Auschwitz”. The nonprofit group the Jalisco Search Warriors which came across it, and whose members are used to finding evidence of drug cartel atrocities and secret graves, were aghast.

Raul Servin Garcia, a member of the group who is searching for his son who went missing in 2018 at the age of 20, said: “It was a tremendous shock. You can’t describe the feeling when you see hundreds of shoes piled up. Your mind immediately imagines the worst.

'You see the clothing, the shoes and you can't control yourself. The tears come running down your eyes, just thinking of the suffering that those poor people endured. One can only pray to God that your loved one was not in that place.”

The group gained entry to the ranch on March 5 after acting on “several anonymous calls,” according to India Navarro, the head of the searchers’ collective.

Inside one building they found a shrine to Santa Muerte, or Holy Death, a female folk saint whose cult is often associated with organised crime. There were also two obstacle courses, one using wires lashed onto logs and another with tires lining the ground.

In one of the buildings they came across 400 pairs of footwear strewn across a room. They also found a notebook with one page that featured the nicknames of 54 victims, with the gangsters apparently living the names in groups of ten.

The searchers also located a Bible that contained three photos of a child. “It’s a photo that moves us and fills us with sadness,” said Mr Navarro. “To think that the last thing that person probably saw was a photo of their son, praying to God for his life so they could return to see and hold this little one.”

The writer of the handwritten letter was later identified as Eduardo Lerma, who would have turned 23 on May 2. He had been missing since February 25, 2024, after he was kidnapped in San Juan de los Lago, Guanajuato.

It is not known who he was writing to, but he added: “I say to you that my anger, tantrums and jealousy are gone.”

It remains unclear exactly how many people were killed in the ranch, which is now being combed over by investigators from Mexico’s National Guard. Nor have forensic teams yet identified any of the dead - a task likely to take a long time.

Photos of almost 500 personal effects such as jeans, T-shirts, blouses, bags and backpacks in an effort to match them with the state’s thousands of missing people.

Jalisco is the Mexican state with the highest number of missing people, according to the National Search Commission, with nearly 15,000 people reported missing.

Most are believed to have been kidnapped or forcibly recruited by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, also known as CJNG, described last year by US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco as “one of the ’s most violent and prolific drug trafficking organisations”.

It is led by feared drug lord Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, the most wanted person in Mexico and one of the most wanted in the US, which last year raised the bounty on his head to $15million. Authorities say he is personally responsible for hundreds of deaths.

Jalisco Search Warriors believe the group recruited young men from a bus station in a suburb of Jalisco’s state capital Guadalajara, 40 miles away.

“They met these young people at the bus terminal with phony promises of work. Many had no idea what they were getting into,” said Mr Garcia.

Ms Navarro said that anonymous survivors had told her that anyone who tried to escape or didn’t measure up to the physical training faced death, with some prisoners even sometimes forced to kill their fellow captives.

Jalisco’s state prosecutor’s office says investigators have now found six groups of charred human bones, some of which were buried underground or hidden in bricks.

But questions are also being asked about why the atrocities weren’t uncovered earlier, after it emerged that the National Guard raided the site last September, when it was still being used by the cartel.

Authorities arrested ten suspects, liberated two captives and also found a body, wrapped in plastic - but didn’t find the evidence of mass murder. When questioned, Salvador Gonzalez de los Santos, the state attorney general, bizarrely claimed the officers “couldn’t examine the entire ranch” because it was too big.

The state authorities now concede that their earlier efforts were 'insufficient' and suffered from 'possible omissions' which are now under investigation.

As outrage over the discovery sweeps the country, the Mexican Attorney General took the podium during President Claudia Sheinbaum's daily press conference on Tuesday, to suggest there may have been collusion between the cartel and local officials.

Vowing to take over the investigation himself, he said: “This is a very critical and serious issue. It is unbelievable that a situation of this nature would not have been known to the local authorities of that municipality and the state.”

Desperate families, however, aren’t waiting for the authorities to discover if their missing loved ones were among the victims inside the ‘Mexican Auschwicz”.

Mr Garcia, from Jalisco Search Warriors, says many have been combing through their chilling images from inside the camp, hoping they won’t recognise any of the hundreds of pieces of clothing and shoes.

He said: “We’ve received various calls from families saying, ‘I think that T-shirt was my son’s. But we have to tell them, ‘Remain calm. Don’t jump to conclusions’. Because it’s very hard to think your loved one was murdered in this way, or passed through such profound pain.”