A heartbreaking love letter has been discovered inside the horrific drug cartel 'extermination camp' being compared to Auschwitz in Mexico.
Truly disturbing images of the camp, which is located south of Guadalajara, Mexico's second biggest city have surfaced online after those desperately pursuing their lost family members and friends made a tragic breakthrough in their search.
According to the Washington Post, over 110,000 people have been reported missing in the South American country in recent years, which prompted the search from a committed Facebook group (Warrior Searchers of Jalisco) which included relatives of the victims.
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And what they found was truly horrifying. They arrived on March 5 at an abandoned ranch outside La Estanzuela and soon dug up three underground ovens. They unearthed hundreds and hundreds of bones shards believed to be from skulls, fingers, teeth. It was clear that this was an extermination camp.
One image, showing hundreds of pairs of shoes, draws obvious comparisons with the thousands of shoes that can still be seen today at the Auschwitz museum in Poland.
“Of course, it immediately evokes the conditions at Auschwitz,” said José Ramón Cossío, the former chief justice of Mexico’s Supreme Court, in an interview with the radio program Aristegui Noticias.
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Raúl Servín García, of Warrior Searchers of Jalisco, said that it was a 'tremendous shock' when he and the others discovered the camp earlier this month.
He added: "The first thought that occurs to you is to hope that no relative — a son, a husband — had ever been in this place, had ever been tortured or murdered there."
But perhaps one of the most heartbreaking images to have come from this tragedy so far is a letter written in 2003, by a man called Eduardo Lerma.
He writes: My love, if someday I don’t return I only ask you to remember how much I love you."
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Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has since confirmed that federal authorities would take on the investigation of the ranch. "The first thing we have to do in that case is investigate, because the images are obviously painful, we really need to know what happened there before anything else.
"That’s why it’s important that there is a coordinated investigation, and obviously determining who is responsible", she said (via Bloomberg).
There is also anger with authorities as back in September 2024, the Mexican National Guard raided the complex and detained 10 people, but no further action was taken until the site was re-discovered by the Warrior Searchers of Jalisco.
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It remains unclear at this point in time who is behind these atrocious acts but reports from across Mexico suggest that one of the country's largest cartels, Jalisco New Generation (CJNG), may well be the culprits.
James Moorhouse