«La ofrenda»

«La ofrenda» is both the name of a sacrifice and the doctrine that gives the cult’s violence its logic. In the account recovered by Amaia Salazar, an offering is not simply a death: it is a required exchange, governed by rules about the victim and completed by surrendering the body. The phrase links a secretive group’s promise of power to its demands on its members, and becomes a practical clue in the investigation as well as a key to interpreting ritualized violence.

A term of exchange

For the group, an offering could secure what a member wanted: health, money, wealth, the removal of a competitor, harm to another person, or revenge. The promised return varied with the nature of the offering, but the principle was expansive: almost anything might be obtained in exchange for a sacrifice. This bargain gave violence an instrumental shape. The victim was treated not as an end in themselves but as the payment through which the petitioner sought a result.

The exchange did not end with the killing. The witness explains that the body had to be ceded and taken to the place where an offering would fulfil its function. He cannot identify that destination, but insists that carrying the body away is part of what offering it means. Elsewhere, the investigation’s account of magical practices describes the corpses of children as especially valued ritual objects, with bodies and body parts assigned uses of their own. The doctrine therefore makes the handling and disappearance of remains consequential: the dead body is not incidental evidence but part of the supposed transaction.

Doctrine and recruitment in Lesaka

The witness’s account traces the doctrine to his time in Lesaka. At twenty-five, after finishing university, he came to the area with friends for San Fermín and was invited to a communal house. Initially, the group presented itself as an exploration of tradition, humanity, and natural forces. Its members listened to the wind, danced around a fire, and held talks for prospective recruits, including local people and tourists drawn by spirituality, witchcraft, or spiritualism. They spoke about Tabese, though the witness did not meet him until later.

After the summer, when most of the visitors had left, the witness was invited to remain. He describes this as the point when the group’s true character emerged. Tabese appeared unpredictably, and his arrival made the house feel celebratory. The witness recalls him as wealthy, stylish, and captivating; the members loved him and believed he gave them power. Tabese taught them an ancient form of witchcraft grounded in a return to tradition and primordial forces. He connected megalithic monuments and ley lines in Baztán to spiritual presences, which, he said, could be awakened through offerings.

The group first understood these exchanges through small animal sacrifices, performed according to prescribed methods. As it received what it interpreted as favours, however, it was asked to give more. The witness says that he and the other members eventually participated in a child’s sacrifice, carried out by the child’s own parents. Afterward, the body was taken away. The group dispersed within weeks, and Tabese did not return. Yet the apparent collapse of the gathering did not, in the witness’s understanding, end the obligations it had imposed.

Rules of the offering

The testimony sets out conditions that distinguish this ritual from an unspecified killing. The victim was to be a girl, younger than two, and unbaptized. The witness attributes the age limit to the belief that a child’s soul remains in transition between birth and the age of two, making the child a more effective offering. A separate explanation given in the investigation similarly describes very young children as moving between two worlds, able to perceive both and therefore suited, in the group’s belief, to communication with spiritual forces. These are the cult’s claims, not independently established properties of the children.

Baptism was excluded because the group regarded it as an offering and commitment to another god. The witness says sacrifices were organized by sex: victims were selected from the same sex and age group and killed under identical circumstances until a cycle was complete. He also describes the consequences for families within the group. Some women, though committed to the act, fell into depression afterward; the instruction was to have another child quickly. The witness, speaking after losing his own son, recognizes the cruelty implicit in treating a new child as a replacement for the one who had died.

The phrase also reaches beyond the witness’s account. After the body of Valentín Esparza’s daughter is found to be missing from the grave, Inés Ballarena reports that her grandmother was not surprised by the disappearance: she understood the dead child as having become an offering. That interpretation echoes the cult’s insistence that a body must be taken and delivered, while showing how its vocabulary can persist as a local explanation of loss.

Obligation, clue, and interpretation

In the witness’s account, leaving the house did not release anyone from the group. Its members dispersed as part of their agreement, but remained bound to it; sooner or later, the witness believes, Inguma would collect the debt of an offering from each of them. He says he has already suffered consequences and has not finished paying. The language of sacrifice thus describes not only a discrete ritual but an enduring debt that makes departure seem impossible even after the group has scattered.

The word also guides Amaia’s reading of Jonan Etxaide’s files. Jonan chose the offering as the password, adding his police badge number. Amaia recognizes the significance of that number and takes the password as a tangible message from her dead colleague, despite her anger at discovering that he had investigated her private life. The clue makes the term a bridge between Jonan’s work and the case’s hidden structure; its meaning is at once investigative and personal.

Later, as Amaia revisits the murders of Ainhoa Elizasu, Carla Huarte, and Anne Arbizu, the witness’s account of transitional childhood informs her interpretation of the victims’ treatment. She considers the exposed bodies, removed pubic hair, and hands turned upward as elements of a ritualized return to childhood and innocence, with the victims posed as if they were being offered. The term therefore gathers several strands of the book’s investigation: a promised exchange, a system of ritual rules, the removal of the dead, and a pattern of violence that Amaia learns to read through details of the body and its arrangement.