MASS MURDER

Even in a country used to almost daily headlines about gruesome gangland murders, kidnappings, and grisly discoveries, the images have left people in shock.

- BY MATT ROPER Senior Feature Writer

One shows hundreds of pairs of discarded shoes. In another, lie piles of clothes, jewellery and suitcases.

Even more chilling are the pictures of charred bones, skulls, fingers and teeth. And the 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 pictures are from a Mexican ranch that police believe was a training camp for a powerful drug cartel.

But the abandoned Rancho Izaguirre in Teuchitian, in the western state of Jalisco, hid a more horrifying secret - as an extermination camp, where it is believed hundreds of young people died.

Last week a volunteer group looking for missing family members, entered the abandoned two-acre site and came across evidence of mass murder.

They also uncovered underground cremation furnaces, which they believe were used to incinerate the bodies of victims. By inserting metal rods into the earth to detect the stench of decomposing bodies, they say they found mass graves.

Footage showing searchers walking through the walled property, which was owned by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, has caused outrage in the country where more than 120,000 are missing.

Headlines dubbed the ranch a "secret extermination camp" and even the "Mexican Auschwitz".

The non-profit group the Jalisco Search Warriors was aghast at its discovery.