Manuel Hidalgo

Manuel Hidalgo is a rural doctor whose records and professional connection to midwife Fina Hidalgo draw him into Amaia Salazar’s inquiry into infant deaths initially classified as sudden infant death syndrome. His signature appears on a birth certificate connected to the Argi Beltz household, and his name is linked to the medical care and death documentation surrounding Amaia’s family. The investigation treats these links as grounds for further scrutiny, not as proof of wrongdoing.

Identity and Medical Role

Hidalgo was a rural physician who served as the family doctor to Amaia Salazar’s family and to many others in Baztán. His sister, Fina Hidalgo, worked as his nurse for years. Home births were traditional in the valley, and Amaia and her sisters were among the children born at home under this kind of care.

His professional role also connected him to official records. He signed the death certificate for Amaia’s twin sister, who died in infancy. That document made his name part of the medical history Amaia later revisited while investigating other infant deaths.

Records Connected to Argi Beltz

Hidalgo also signed the birth certificate of Ainara Martínez Bayón. The document records her birth in Elizondo on 12 March 1979, while specifying a home birth at the Argi Beltz farmhouse in Orabidea. The certificate therefore links him to the household at the center of Amaia’s inquiry into the old group associated with the property.

The family’s account was that Ainara died in Britain, but Amaia’s investigation found no death certificate, hospital record, or record of her death in the relevant civil registry. The absence of those documents did not itself establish what happened to Ainara; it made the account difficult to verify and heightened the importance of the surviving records, including the birth certificate signed by Hidalgo.

Connection to the Infant-Death Inquiry

The inquiry began against a background in which sudden infant death was a recognized, exclusion-based diagnosis: it was used when an autopsy revealed no other cause. Records from Navarra listed seventeen such deaths over five years, four in Baztán. Two cases had also prompted social-services investigations of the families, though the available records did not explain their outcome. A forensic doctor recalled two apparently healthy girls whose autopsies had not suggested unnatural deaths, while noting concerns about their parents’ conduct.

Amaia came to suspect that Hidalgo and Fina had attended the mothers of several girls who died in their sleep. Fina had attended Amaia’s mother when Amaia and her sister were born; her brother had signed the twin’s death certificate. Fina had also tried to attend the birth of Valentín Esparza’s daughter, though Esparza instead brought her to his home in an effort to persuade his wife to give birth there. Amaia believed Fina had probably attended other births in the cases under review, but presented this as a line of inquiry rather than a confirmed account of every attendance.

Investigative Significance and Limits

The overlap between home births, Hidalgo’s medical work, Fina’s midwifery, and the certificates associated with infant deaths gave Amaia a concrete reason to investigate the siblings’ records. She obtained a search order for the files of the doctor and nurse who had attended her mother, believing they might be the same medical workers connected to the other girls who died while sleeping. At that point, the records were a potential source of evidence; the account does not establish what the search ultimately uncovered.

Hidalgo’s significance is thus documentary and connective. His signature links him to both a disputed birth record and the death certificate of Amaia’s sister, while his family and professional association with Fina places him within the network of care Amaia was examining. Those connections raise questions about how the deaths were attended and recorded, but the evidence presented does not identify Hidalgo as a perpetrator or show that his records alone resolved the investigation.