Rosario Iturzaeta—Elena Ochoa

Rosario Iturzaeta and Elena Ochoa’s friendship began as an intimate, everyday companionship and ended over their opposing responses to a secretive group’s rituals. Elena remembered the loss as a deep personal grief: she had loved Rosario as a friend, and the break deprived her of the one person with whom she could talk freely. Years later, recounting the history to Amaia Salazar, Elena described how a shared social world gave way to fear, accusation, and silence.

Friendship and Shared Life

Elena recalled that when Rosario arrived in the area, the two women became inseparable. They walked together, looked after their daughters, shopped, and went to the park. Their companionship was not limited to practical help with family life; above all, they talked. Elena emphasized the value of having someone to confide in, and her account makes the friendship’s intimacy legible through these repeated, ordinary activities rather than through a single dramatic declaration.

The women were mothers with children of similar ages. Elena’s daughter was about the age of Rosario’s older daughter, giving their friendship a natural setting in the routines of childcare. Elena’s recollection also carries a distinct imbalance of perspective: she tells Amaia how much Rosario mattered to her, but Rosario is absent from the later conversation and cannot give her own account of the friendship or its ending. Elena says she hoped time might change Rosario’s mind, but that reconciliation never came.

The Group and Its Changing Practices

The account places the friendship’s fracture within a group that presented itself as a gathering for bodily and emotional expression. Its meetings took place at a farmhouse owned by an attractive, well-dressed, persuasive man whom Elena understood to be a psychologist or something similar, though she did not know whether he had any qualifications. The early discussions ranged across subjects such as UFO sightings, abductions, and astral travel. Gradually, the meetings concentrated instead on witchcraft, magic, magical symbols, and the valley’s history of witchcraft.

Elena found the secretive atmosphere less appealing than Rosario did. Rosario, she recalled, was fascinated by the group and by the prospect of belonging to a clandestine circle. That difference mattered because the meetings did not remain at the level of unusual talk or shared interest. The group began sacrificing animals, including roosters, cats, and lambs. Elena distinguished these acts from the ordinary killing of livestock she had known growing up on a farmhouse: the group treated the animals as ritual offerings, collected their blood in wooden bowls, and stored it in bottles with an ingredient that kept it liquid. The blood had, in Elena’s words as she explained it to Amaia, an excessive importance within the group’s practice.

The group’s leader spoke of other circles across Navarra and sometimes left for days to visit them. He announced that a group from Lesaka would come to help the members advance to a higher level. Those visitors repeatedly referred to a human act as a uniquely significant sacrifice, distinguishing it from the animal offerings already familiar to Elena. One man explained that a cat or lamb could be a sacrifice, but that the human act alone was the Sacrifice. The distinction changed the stakes for Elena: what had seemed an unsettling group activity now carried the suggestion of violence against a person.

The Break and Its Immediate Cause

Elena said she was already frightened by the animal rituals when she heard the group’s language about human sacrifice. She had grown up hearing stories about witches killing children as offerings before eating them, stories she had assumed were old wives’ tales. When the leader later announced that the visitors from Lesaka had carried out the Sacrifice, Elena did not know whether to take the claim literally. She searched newspapers for reports of dead or missing children but found none. The absence of a report did not reassure her enough to stay: she told Rosario that they should leave the group.

Rosario reacted angrily. According to Elena, she insisted that Elena did not understand the importance of their activity or the power they discussed, and accused her of betraying the group. Elena understood this response as evidence that Rosario had been brainwashed. She stopped attending the meetings, while Rosario’s continued involvement remained Elena’s belief rather than something she witnessed directly. Elena inferred that Rosario kept going because Rosario never spoke to her again; she did not claim to have seen her return to the farmhouse or observed her at a later meeting.

The conversation’s initial suggestion that a man stood between the women is clarified by Elena’s account of the group. She denied that she and Rosario had been romantically involved with one another, but the evidence does not establish a simple romantic cause for the separation. Instead, the recollection develops a more specific account: their opposing judgments about the group, and especially Elena’s refusal to accept its escalating sacrifices, turned disagreement into a breach. The group’s persuasive male leader and its authority over Rosario form part of the context, but Elena identifies the conflict between herself and Rosario over what they were doing as the direct point of rupture.

Silence, Reminders, and Later Significance

Leaving the meetings did not immediately free Elena from the group’s influence. For months, she received what she called reminders: things that other people might have overlooked but that she understood as messages. When Amaia asked why the group sent them, Elena said she believed they were meant to remind her not to speak about it. Her account presents the reminders as a continuing pressure after her departure, though it does not specify each item or identify who delivered them.

Elena eventually told Amaia this history during a conversation that reopened a long-closed personal wound. She described having no other friends at the time and losing not just a companion but the person with whom she had shared daily life and private conversation. Her belief that Rosario continued with the group rests on the later silence between them, a silence she experienced both as confirmation and as permanent loss.

The recollection also gives Amaia a personal route into Rosario’s past: the mother she is questioning was once a friend who drew Elena into the same secretive circle, then remained committed to it after Elena withdrew. Elena’s testimony does not settle every uncertainty about what Rosario did afterward or what the group actually carried out. It does establish the relationship’s decisive division: one woman left when ritual claims became intolerable, while the other, as Elena understood it, chose the group and ceased speaking to her. Their shared walks, childcare, shopping, and conversation thus stand in sharp contrast to the warnings and silence that followed.