Argi Beltz Group

The Argi Beltz Group was a secretive sect that met at a farmhouse in Baztán during the 1970s and became central to the investigation into ritualized child killings. Its members described their practices as a return to ancient spiritual traditions, but the beliefs they adopted were organized around offerings that escalated from animals to human life. The group’s influence extended beyond a single house: a protected witness described similar practices in Lesaka under the direction of the same elusive leader, Tabese.

Formation and Recruitment

The investigation connected the group to meetings at Argi Beltz attended by affluent local hosts and people associated with Doctor Berasategui, Nurse Hidalgo, Yolanda Berrueta’s former husband, and Valentín Esparza. The meetings had initially been explained as gatherings to help people through grief. Amaia Salazar’s protected source said their actual character was different, while a separate witness corroborated the existence of the sect and the birth and suspicious death of Ainara Martínez Bayón at Argi Beltz. Her parents said she had died of a stroke while abroad, but Jonan Etxaide’s inquiry indicated that she might never have left Spain; investigators found no British death certificate, autopsy report, or burial record.

One former member recalled arriving in Lesaka at twenty-five, after finishing university, during the San Fermín celebrations. He had been invited to a shared house that first seemed like a playful commune interested in tradition, human nature, and the forces of nature. Its residents grew cannabis, listened to the wind, danced around fires, and held talks for possible recruits, including local people and tourists seeking spirituality, magic, or witchcraft associated with Baztán. The name Tabese was often invoked, though the newcomer did not initially meet him. When summer ended and most visitors left, the witness was invited to stay; he said that this was when the group’s true nature began to emerge.

Leadership and Belief System

The former member described Tabese as a wealthy, polished man who appeared without warning and whose arrival turned the house into a celebration. He estimated that Tabese was about forty-five at the time. The group did not know where he lived or when he would return; after each visit, its members waited for the next. The witness recalled being captivated by him and said the members loved him and would do what he asked. Tabese, in their account, supplied both authority and access to power: he taught them what to do, how to do it, and how to understand their practices as the recovery of forgotten religion and ancient relations with the forces of the land.

The group’s teaching drew on claims about megalithic markers and ley lines crossing Baztán. Tabese said that ancient inhabitants had identified spiritually significant alignments and that powerful presences could be awakened through offerings. The witness described the members’ belief that these forces could grant what they wanted in return for life, beginning with carefully performed sacrifices of domestic animals. He recalled that the first apparent favors made the group feel powerful; as the benefits accumulated, so did the demands. In Amaia Salazar’s later account to the police, the group’s doctrine offered access to these forces without prayer, religious discipline, or limits on desire, with offerings as the price.

The Sacrificial Rules

The group’s human offering was described as a structured rite rather than an unspecified act of violence. The protected witness said it had to be a girl under two years old and unbaptized. In the group’s belief, a child below that age was still in transition between worlds and therefore especially suitable as a vehicle for contact with spiritual forces. Baptism disqualified the child because it was itself understood as an offering and commitment to another god. The witness said the child had to be killed in the manner associated with Inguma, by deprivation of air, and that the body then had to be handed over as part of the offering. He did not know what happened to the body of the girl associated with the Lesaka crime; he said that completing the ritual was also a parental responsibility.

A discussion of the age rule gave it a further practical dimension. Children, according to the group’s rationale, were especially suitable before language marked a changed relationship with their surroundings; the investigator also noted that a death before a child’s second birthday could be easier to explain than the death of an adolescent. The protected witness said sacrifices were organized by sex and age, with victims taken in groups under similar circumstances until a cycle was complete. He recalled that men were generally the most committed participants, while some women suffered severe depression afterward; in some cases, he said, women had not known what their husbands intended to do.

Membership, Debt, and Consequences

After the child’s death, the Lesaka group began to break apart. Most members disappeared within a month, Tabese did not return, and the witness was among the last to leave; only the couple who had made the offering remained. But dispersal did not, in the group’s own account, end membership. The former member insisted that nobody could truly leave and nobody was exempt from making an offering: the group could scatter as part of its arrangement, yet its members remained bound to it, and Inguma would eventually collect what was owed.

That belief continued to shape the witness’s interpretation of later loss. Years afterward, he encountered a former member while his own eight-year-old son was being treated for cancer. The man told him that the illness could be solved through a sacrifice. The witness described the temptation to believe him in the face of his child’s suffering, and later understood the boy’s death as a consequence of what had happened at the house decades earlier. He said he had not finished paying the price and expected the group to destroy him. His account makes the group’s supposed benefits inseparable from its threat: the promise of power came with a debt that could be deferred but, in its doctrine, never cancelled.

Significance in the Investigation

The group’s teachings gave investigators a possible framework for connecting the secret meetings, the unexplained death of Ainara Martínez Bayón, and later evidence concerning other children. Amaia Salazar presented the testimony as an investigative lead, not as proof that supernatural forces existed. She emphasized the overlap between the group’s reported practices and the people linked to the meetings, and directed investigators to examine separated parents who might authorize access to family tombs. She also suggested looking for Tabese under professional identities such as psychologist, psychiatrist, or doctor, following Elena Ochoa’s belief that he had training related to psychology.

The group also illustrates how ritual language could organize coercive social relations. In a broader explanation of destructive sects, the investigation described leaders as identifying followers’ vulnerabilities and reshaping them through a group that offered love, protection, respect, and a sense of importance. The former member’s recollection of adoration for Tabese and of waiting for his unpredictable visits gives that analysis a specific human form. The Argi Beltz Group’s power rested not only on its sacrificial rules, but on the emotional attachment and promised belonging through which those rules could be accepted and the obligation to obey made to seem permanent.