Décadas de 1970 y 1980

Décadas de 1970 y 1980 is the period in which a pseudo-Satanist group took root in Baztán and Lesaka, moving from communal counterculture into rituals that included human sacrifice. What appeared to begin as a search for spirituality and older traditions became, in retrospect, the buried history that connects Rosario, Elena Ochoa, Doctor Berasategui, and a series of suspicious deaths.## Historical setting and locations Accounts place the group’s activity from the late 1970s into the early 1980s. One base was a farmhouse in Orabidea, later renovated into a guarded mansion; a related group met at Argi Beltz, while similar practices were reported at a farmhouse in Lesaka. The locations were not simply private homes: they hosted meetings where newcomers could be drawn into a shared language of nature, magic, and spiritual power.

A former member recalled arriving in the area with friends for San Fermín. He was invited to a communal house whose residents presented their way of life as an exploration of tradition, humanity, and the forces of nature. The group grew its own marijuana, listened to the wind, danced around fires, and held talks for locals and visitors seeking spirituality, witchcraft, magic, or spiritualism. At first, this mixture seemed playful and inviting; its darker purpose emerged only later.

The period also belonged to a wider countercultural moment. Amaia Salazar described young people disillusioned with Christianity and conservative society, drawn to free love, drugs, and occultism. She connected the groups’ aesthetic to pseudo-Satanist movements such as that associated with Charles Manson, while noting that many such experiments faded when the drugs ran out. That historical context helps explain the group’s initial appeal, but does not lessen the significance of what its members came to do.## From commune to occult hierarchy The former member said the group spoke often of a leader called Tabese, although he did not meet him until September, after most of the summer visitors had left. He remembered him as wealthy, stylish, and powerfully attractive, someone whose sudden appearances transformed the house into a celebration. Members waited for his return and believed they loved him; he told them what to do and presented himself as the source of special knowledge and power.

Tabese framed the group’s beliefs as a recovery of ancient traditions and a relationship with primal forces through offerings. He taught that megalithic monuments and ley lines marked the land and that spiritual beings could be awakened by gifts. At first, the group offered small animals. The former member recalled that the promised favors made them feel powerful, but that each favor brought demands for greater offerings. The period’s shift from experimentation to coercive ritual is reflected in this escalation: the group’s language of shared discovery became a system in which sacrifice was treated as an obligation.

The group’s beliefs also assigned special significance to children under two. Jonan Etxaide explained that, in many cultures, children of that age were imagined as moving between two worlds and therefore as suitable intermediaries with spiritual forces. The former member described more specific rules: a victim had to be a girl, under two years old, and unbaptized. In his account, the group believed baptism constituted an offering to another god, while infancy marked a transitional state that made a child especially suitable for their rites. These are the group’s beliefs as reported in the investigation, not independently established supernatural facts.## Sacrifice, dispersal, and lasting debt A former member eventually disclosed that the group had carried out a human sacrifice. He said the victim’s own parents offered and killed her, and that the body was taken away afterward. Within days, the group began to break apart; in less than a month, its members had disappeared, leaving only the couple who had made the offering. The witness was among the last to leave, and said he never saw most of the members again.

Dispersal did not, in the group’s own account, mean release. The former member insisted that no one could truly leave and that every member remained bound to make an offering, whatever the passage of time. He interpreted later suffering, including the death of his son, as the delayed consequence of the group’s past actions. His testimony reveals how the group’s doctrine could convert guilt and grief into continuing allegiance: its members might scatter geographically while remaining subject, in their understanding, to an unpaid debt.

The period’s ritual logic appears elsewhere in the investigation in descriptions of suffocation and the transfer of a child’s body as an offering to Inguma. The former member said the victim had to be unbaptized and under two, and that sacrifices were organized by sex, age, and similar circumstances until a cycle was complete. He also described the expectation that women who participated should have children again quickly, while acknowledging that some mothers suffered deeply and that some did not know what their husbands had done. These details expose the human cost beneath the group’s language of spiritual exchange.## The past uncovered by the investigation Decades later, the group’s history became a practical lead in Amaia Salazar’s investigation. Elena Ochoa had attended meetings with Rosario and left after the rites became too savage. She told Amaia about the old group and its farmhouse in Orabidea. Amaia connected this account to the unexplained interval after Rosario left the clinic with Doctor Berasategui, and to the possibility that they had sheltered at a location other than the house of Amaia’s aunt.

The investigation widened beyond the original farmhouse. Amaia reported evidence of similar practices at a Lesaka property and described a leader who moved between the groups without living with either. The wealthy couple then living at the renovated Orabidea mansion had belonged to the original circle; they acknowledged knowing Berasategui, whose car a witness had repeatedly identified at the house. They had also said that their daughter died before the age of two during a trip to the United Kingdom, but investigators found no death certificate, hospital record, or record of the journey. Their daughter’s history echoed the group’s reported age rule without, by itself, proving what had happened to her.

Other connections brought the old gatherings into the present investigation. Amaia linked the group and its meeting places to families whose young daughters had died in their sleep, including her own family, and to Berasategui’s treatment of victims’ bodies. She also named Nurse Hidalgo, Valentín Esparza, and the former husband of Yolanda Berrueta among people associated with meetings at the property. Separately, the Vatican’s interest in Berasategui’s encrypted case files showed that the investigation’s reach extended beyond the local history, though the surviving evidence here does not establish the full nature of that intervention.

The period therefore functions as more than a backdrop. Its vanished commune survives through places, testimony, repeated rituals, and relationships that connect apparently isolated tragedies. The group’s quick dispersal concealed neither the obligations its members believed in nor the consequences that later investigators would trace back to its meetings.