El patrón de muertes junto al río Baztán-Bidasoa

El patrón de muertes junto al río Baztán-Bidasoa is the spatial pattern Amaia Salazar identifies when she plots infant deaths against the river’s course. What first appears to be a collection of isolated cases becomes a disturbing corridor of locations, extending from the Baztán Valley into Guipúzcoa. The map does not establish that every death was criminal, but it changes the investigation: geography becomes a way to connect families, medical histories, and suspected ritual activity that had previously been examined separately.

How the Pattern Emerges

Jonan Etxaide’s files give Amaia a starting point: a list of addresses for babies whose sudden deaths had already been investigated. The list includes Amaia’s own twin sister, but not the children of Yolanda Berrueta. When Amaia replots the cases, she first considers whether the points follow the N-121, since serial crimes can occur near major routes that facilitate escape. That arrangement does not persuade her. She then prints a fresh map, marks the localities of the victims—including herself and her sister—and notices that excluding the Ainhoa cases makes the remaining points form a line. Its alignment is not with the road but with the fine blue trace of the river.

The line runs from Erratzu through Arraioz, passing Elbete and Elizondo, and continues toward Oieregi, where Haizea’s case extends the sequence. The visual discovery gives new force to the repeated instruction to cleanse the river: what had seemed like language tied to the investigation’s ritual imagery now resonates with the geography of the deaths. Amaia adds further marks as she compares the map with the group’s history and the cases under review. The small points represent children whose identities and circumstances had often been reduced to a brief record of death; together, they reveal a pattern the individual files concealed.

The Cases Behind the Map

The geographic correspondence is weighed alongside recurring features of the families. Amaia presents the investigated victims as girls who died in infancy or while still very young, most commonly recorded as sudden infant deaths. The families had not been in good financial circumstances when the children died, yet later experienced improved prosperity. In at least four cases examined by social services or investigators—including those involving Yolanda Berrueta and Valentín Esparza—the parents said around the time of a child’s death that things would improve from then on. These parallels sharpen suspicion, but they are treated as points for profiling and investigation, not as independent proof of a shared crime.

The map also gathers older and less settled cases. Amaia asks that investigators add the girl associated with Argi Beltz, her own sister, the girl from Lesaka, the daughter of the wealthy lawyer couple Lejarreta y Andía in Elbete, and the girl whose father confronted the forensic doctor in Erratzu. The lawyer couple had claimed that their daughter died during a trip to the United Kingdom, but investigators found no death certificate, hospital record, or evidence that the child had travelled there. Their connection to the old group and the presence of Doctor Berasategui at their house add context to the suspicious absence of documentation; neither the map nor proximity alone resolves what happened to the child.

From a Local River to a Wider Search

The map’s first frame is too narrow. Amaia recognizes that the Baztán River changes its name as it passes beyond Navarra: farther along, it is called the Bidasoa River, though it remains the same river. Jonan’s notes about Nurse Hidalgo supply the link that makes this geographical correction consequential. Before retiring, Hidalgo worked as a midwife at hospitals and clinics in Irún and Hondarribia. If she had been connected to the practices under investigation and had approached families through her work, her activity might have extended beyond the stretch initially plotted in Navarra.

Amaia therefore tells Montes to expand the search to girls who died suddenly in Guipúzcoa as well as Navarra, especially those from communities near the Bidasoa River. The widened inquiry identifies cases in Elizondo, Oronoz-Mugaire, Narbarte, and Doneztebe, as well as two in Hondarribia after an initial group of four cases there is reduced through checks of baptismal records. That screening is slow: investigators must identify each child’s parish and consult its priest, who alone can access the relevant records and may only be available during parish office hours.

When the earlier cases are added in a different colour, the plotted points trace the river from its source to its mouth, crossing from the Baztán River to the Bidasoa River as the water and its name pass through different jurisdictions. The resulting succession of marked towns gives the team a practical search area and a reason to look across administrative boundaries, rather than treating the Navarra cases as a closed set.

What the Pattern Can—and Cannot—Show

The spatial line gains significance because it intersects with evidence about relationships among families, medical workers, and the old groups at Argi Beltz and Lesaka. Amaia describes a history of occult gatherings and animal sacrifices at Argi Beltz, and reports that a reliable informant has confirmed similar practices at a house in Lesaka. The same account points to a leader who moved between the groups. Berasategui’s presence at the lawyers’ home, the possible involvement of Nurse Hidalgo, and the suspected connections among parents make the map one part of a larger investigative network. Shared geography helps direct attention to those connections; it does not, on its own, prove that everyone connected to a location participated in wrongdoing.

The pattern also exposes the limits of what the investigators can verify. Amaia says they have no way to confirm their suspicion about the girl’s absence from the Ainhoa grave, and a judicial permit to inspect it again is out of reach. Yolanda’s insistence that her children’s bodies were missing is initially dismissed as the product of grief and confusion. Later she says that, had the tomb been opened as planned, the absent girl might still have gone unnoticed, and other families might never have been heard. Her account gives the map an urgent human consequence: counting and locating cases matters because a child’s disappearance can be obscured by a diagnosis, a grave, or the assumption that a bereaved mother is not credible.

The river line is therefore both an analytical tool and a narrative image. It converts dispersed deaths into a visible sequence, prompts the investigators to follow the water beyond a provincial boundary, and brings overlooked children into the same field of attention. Its force lies not in offering a final explanation, but in showing where separate records may belong to a single investigation—and where the evidence still leaves essential questions open.