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Nightmare Fuel / Ghost Recon Wildlands

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  • Pay a visit to the village of Culta which was razed to the ground on El Sueño's orders for sheltering an escaped prisoner. You'll see cages similar to those you'll find around Bolivia where prisoners are typically held until you free them. In Culta, they are empty except for ash and other debris.
  • Up the road from Culta, pay a visit to the village of Yopil where every human inhabitant had disappeared without a trace overnight except for some feral dogs. The locals believed there was a curse but the Ghosts share their opinion with the skeptics that the cartel simply kidnapped them all. To what fate, no one has an answer. Just another way Santa Blanca maintains power with fear.
  • A frequent in-game prop you'll find is a crucified corpse with its entire lower half burned down to the bone while whatever remaining flesh on the top half is scorched beyond recognition. It's a horrifying, monstrous method of execution, clearly meant to cause as much agony as possible.
    • One variation of said prop is found in Charamokho Village in Pucara, where the Cartel positioned a headlight under the corpse so that it casts the shadow on the wall of a cartel house, marked with a cross. To the unaware, it seems like a religious symbol meant to bring ease to these peoples' hearts, but even the Cartel are able to bastardize it through such inhumane methods and turn it into yet another symbol of fear.
    • A few more can be found on what appears to be an execution ground in Pucara province, which is situated on the top of a dam. If anything shows how absolutely lawless Bolivia has become, it's that Santa Blanca openly executes people on a landmark that any civilian or UNIDAD soldier could drive by, or see from the nearby hills.
  • Pick up a Kingslayer File on Yuri and El Polito, torturers for the cartel, consisting of an audio recording of them talking about one of their recently expired victims which is a lot more graphic than it needs to be.
    • Speaking of the happy couple, their Torture Cellar, which also happens to be where you corner and kill them, is an absolutely nightmarish place. Not content with just having an operating theater-style setup, there's a second level beneath it, containing what can only be described as a human paddock and a live vivisection laboratory. If you're not feeling nauseous at what you're seeing, you'll probably be wishing you had the option to deliver a far more horrific and deserving death to these monsters, instead of a comparatively merciful burst of gunfire.
  • El Sueño, at the end of the game, turning to reveal he's beheaded Pac Katari and proudly presents his disturbingly realistic-looking severed head. If anyone deserved it, it was Pac Katari, but damn if it isn't gruesome.
  • La Santera's church/home. It looks normal, and she keeps a very beautiful house. But going into the basement reveals ritual slabs for human sacrifice and cells holding both human and animal sacrifices, with the humans begging you not to harm them and the animals locked in with human corpses. Even the sicarios are put off by it, thinking it's un-Catholic. Worst of all? Like so much of the game, it was inspired by real life.
  • Every so often as you travel around Bolivia, you may see an explosion or flare off in the distance. The implication is that these are clashes between Santa Blanca, the Rebels and UNIDAD. As the game progresses and Santa Blanca gradually loses control, these become more and more frequent. Now put yourself in the shoes of the people who actually live in Bolivia. Imagine seeing the once peaceful countryside rocked by explosions and gunfire every night, and even though there's less Sicarios around, the fighting only seems to be getting worse. It's a subtle reminder by the game that, even though your intentions are noble, and the Santa Blanca narcos you're gunning down certainly deserve it, in the grand scheme of things you're just making the situation in Bolivia even worse.
  • El Pozolero. This guy's job is to make bodies disappear for the cartel. How does he do that? Burying them in mass graves or mine shafts? Dumping them into the lakes? No. He submerges the bodies in barrels full of sodium hydroxide, and stirs until the body dissolves into a liquid. He then dumps the resulting "stew" and smashes any bone fragments that are left. The only saving grace is that his victims are dead by the time he starts his work. Usually. And when you actually do confront the man, it turns out that he's utterly unable to understand just how horrifying his job really is. This arguably makes it even worse-Santa Blanca basically made a mentally disabled man do their dirty work.
  • La Plaga's bragging about his torture-filled, slow executions on social media is evil enough. Then you realize that he has no problem torturing and executing kids on camera. He actually gets so bad that even Sueño wants him dead.
  • The mission to capture El Cerebro is a tricky one. He's pretty cagey and he leaves a tough trail to follow. Finally you bag him and drag him back to your safe house...and it turns out you got the wrong guy. El Cerebro knew you were coming and had the foresight to not only bug out and replace himself with a double, but leave a trail of fake evidence designed to lure you away. While the Ghosts admit they're rather impressed with his work, it still leaves you wondering where El Cerebro is now, and since he's, canonically, the only Bunchon to escape being captured or killed by the Ghosts, what is he planning next?
  • Some of Bowman and Nomad's interrogations come off as this. The worst one has to be that of Antonio Garcia-Taylor. This hombre was in charge of guarding cocaine stashes, but constantly ended up getting high on the product he was supposed to be guarding. So what do Bowman and Nomad do with him during his interrogation? Force him to sniff line after line of cocaine until his body can no longer tolerate it. In no time at all he cracks.
  • When Ramon Feliz has a change of heart and decides to post a story on the child trafficking being done by Santa Blanca, the Ghosts are sent to extract him. When they get to Feliz though, they find out Santa Blanca got there first. It wasn't enough to kill him though, as his brutally tortured corpse is found nailed to the wall of his bedroom.
    • The guy who killed him is also a real piece of work. You find him because the stupid, sadistic bastard took a photo with the corpse. Then when you interrogate him, he's covered in fresh blood and when he can't get away with his obvious lies, he openly brags about how cool the murder was.
  • El Way was injured in a laboratory explosion that just about melted off the left side of his face. When we finally get to see his injury up close, it's not pretty. And then Bowman threatens to attack the other side with a blowtorch to get him to talk.
  • El Sueño is nightmare fuel incarnate. Even though you only ever see him in cutscenes, the way he carries himself, the way he speaks, the level of devotion his followers give him, and his tolerance for failure show that this is a guy you do not want to piss off.
    • By the time the game has started, he's already managed to turn almost all of Bolivia into a narco-state, wielding more power and influence than the leaders of the country. This ultimately factors into Bowman's decision to kill him in one of the endings. She believes that given his resources and influence, he could eventually turn into an outright dictator.
  • The Ghosts gradually become this to Santa Blanca as the game goes on. By the time you start working your way towards the heads of the cartel, all the Buchons and lieutenants you capture know exactly who you are and what you're capable of doing. To say quite a few of them are scared shitless is an understatement.
  • In their efforts to track down the Buchon in charge of training Santa Blanca's elite sicarios, one mission involves finding a deserter from the program, when you find the man in question (and "man" is a stretch, he comes across as barely more than a teenager himself) and return him to Bowman, he weeps as he recounts being handed a hammer and being forced to beat a fifteen year old to death, saying he can still hear them screaming.
    • Speaking of Carl Brookhardt's training regimen, it becomes very clear that he's a Drill Sergeant Nasty in charge of a Training from Hell regimen that makes even El Sueño himself balk at the brutality of it. More than half of his recruits are killed or maimed in live fire exercises, a ratio which would horrify most drill sergeants, and along with the above mentioned exercise includes a group bonding experience where sicarios in-the-making take turns hacking to death innocent civilians and those who failed the course, including children with a machete. The graduates of this course are even made to recite an oath to Santa Blanca for a final bit of indoctrination, which you can hear on a Kingslayer File tape. It's also not very far off from the training camps run by actual Mexican drug cartels.
    • The Montoyuc silver-mine-turned-training-camp houses a horrifying sight at the end of its mineshaft; seven unlucky civilians hanging from nooses suspended down the mine shaft. It's all too common to see the cartel's victims hanging from signal posts and poles along the road, but never so many at once. Either this is part of the training program, or just another exhibit of cartel brutality. One of the hanging corpses is a child.
  • If you look around in Caimanes, you can eventually find a small campsite with a toy lying on the ground. Picking it up will unlock the legend of "The Boy Who Turned Into a Lake". Apparently, the lake in the area was once a swamp, and was the only place the villagers could wash their clothes. One day, a boy went to help his mother, but got lost and vanished in the swamp. They now seem to think he's the reason that the area eventually turned into a prosperous lake.
  • Recently in the new DLC, the Ghosts can gain a Bonus Mission. The mission starts with a woman, who was running from a group of Cartel gangsters, covered in blood and muttering nonsense. The nonsense? That she saw the jungle come alive and take them. Yes... it is EXACTLY what you think it is.
    • Nomad's tone of voice when the team finally encounter the beast says it all. Instead of being cool and calm as he usually is, he outright shouts his orders and genuinely sounds scared shitless!
  • Those who play Rainbow Six Siege know that Caveira is considered in-universe nightmare fuel. Those who haven't get one hell of an introduction in the crossover "Operation: Archangel." Caveira has gone MIA in Bolivia and the Ghosts are tasked with helping Rainbow track her down. Every time you visit a location she's been, there's dozens of dead sicarios left in her wake.
    Sicario: The Devil came! The Devil came and it killed them!
    • When you finally do catch up to her, she's performing her signature interrogation on an unlucky hombre. The sight alone is enough to unnerve Nomad.
    • At the end of the crossover, when Caveira's brother reveals that he can't actually share his intel about El Sueño until after he clears it with his own superior officers, Bowman, unwilling to wait that long, subtly threatens to have him renditioned to a CIA black site for interrogation, infuriating Caveira and upsetting Team Rainbow. Even Nomad, who by this point has done a number of unsavory things in the name of the mission, is visibly unnerved by it, and quickly assures Team Rainbow that it was a bluff.
  • Arturo Rey's seriously unhinged briefing video in Narco Road shows that he considers an ideal form of devotion to Santa Muerte to be hanging decapitated corpses upside-down from trees.
  • You'll occasionally stumble upon mundane locations that have hidden horrors within. One example is La Cote Molinos in Tabacal, which is described as and looks like a regular trash dump...until you look over the hillside the dump is on, where there's a dozen bound and executed corpses lying behind the dump.
    • The innocuous village of Matico in Barvechos is a peaceful village with no sicarios and houses retired farmers. The villagers go about their lives completely undisturbed. But there's three bodies hanging on the outside of the town from telephone poles surrounded by garbage, implying that the cartel pays a visit every now and again. Not even the smallest, most faraway village is safe from the cartel.
  • El Yeti, a hostile sniper that can be found in the snowy wilds of Inca Camina. The game gives no info as to who he is or why he's out in the middle of nowhere, but he's a world class sniper, responsible for dozens of deaths (if the numerous bodies that the player encounters during the initial Yeti Hunt live event that introduced him to the game are anything to go by) that can spot you easily from at least twice as far away than any Santa Blanca or UNIDAD sniper, he's a One-Hit Kill, and the Ghosts have to cross a large swath of open landscape with very little cover before getting close enough to engage him. Successfully killing him nets the player his arctic-patterned ghillie suit and pants. But not all the deaths look like that of a sniper, and more chilling is that an animalistic roar plays when you finally find his presence via a bloodstained rock with a paw print on it. Apparently, El Yeti is not the only yeti in Bolivia...
  • El Sueño's monologues on the radio are chilling.
    • In one, he talks about a dream he had of Coyote, the trickster god. Coyote eats his own litter of pups like how Kronos consumed his children, then lays down. His pups, now fully grown wolves, burst out of his belly covered in viscera and Coyote's guts, and howl to the moon.

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