Ignacio's paternal grandfather,[1] José Joaquín Baleztena Echeverría, a native of Navarrese Leitza, tried his luck in California and Cuba before returning to the home town, where he owned two buildings next to Ayuntamiento.

[15] Joaquín (Joaquíncho) was active in El Pensamiento Navarro;[16] Javier was director of Archivo General de Navarra and is author of historical and historiographical works related to the province,[17] while Cruz Maria directed B-class movies.

[26] He commenced his lifetime career as a youngster, co-organising and shaping various village feasts – especially the local santiburcios – in Leitza;[27] in the family house he set up an amateur theatre, where he directed and performed along friends and relatives, staging also his own juvenile plays.

Became engaged in a number of Catholic initiatives aimed against Ley del Candado, the most momentous having been the huge 1908 Gipuzkoan gathering known as acto de Zumárraga.

[36] In 1911 he was elected president of Juventud Jaimista in Pamplona,[37] though his leadership style was peculiar, with special focus on zarzuelas, balls, juegos florales,[38] historical re-enactments, spectacles and other carnivalesque performance genres.

[50] Baleztena was vital to development and re-organisation of Archivo General de Navarra,[51] the place where he spent more and more time as researcher starting late 1920s[52] and which turned into his primary employment in the 1930s, when he was discharged from most other duties.

[54] In 1940 he founded Museo de Recuerdos Históricos in Pamplona, intended as Carlist cultural outpost;[55] he was managing it as a director until the museum, due to run-down conditions of the building and amidst controversial circumstances, shut down in the mid-1960s.

[59] Since early youth Baleztena demonstrated particular interest in everything related to Giants and Bigheads;[60] he was engaged in design, construction and carrying the figures.

[62] His interests gradually broadened to all Pamplonese feasts; in the 1920s he emerged as their key organizer[63] and expert, publishing a number of related works[64] and incalculable newspaper pieces.

[71] All feasts contained a strong if not vital religious component, like the massive 1922 celebrations commemorating San Francisco Javier, styled as "arquetipo navarro.

[78] It was Baleztena and his friends who in 1911 first performed riau-riau; it remains debated whather the ritual was intended as a Carlist demonstration dogging the Liberal-dominated city council[79] or simply as a juvenile joke.

[87] Some consider it a strategy of disseminating authoritarian discourse, which by means of cultural identification mobilised the society along conservative lines, a process similar to those employed by the Nazis in the Weimar Republic.

[97] Baleztena opposed the usage of ikurriña as contrived and championed traditional provincial flags instead; he criticised newly invented feasts like Aberri Eguna, especially the 4th one staged in Pamplona.

As early as 1956 the communist intelligence considered the group a potentially promising area[112] and indeed, in the 1960s[113] it became a nucleus of socialism,[114] which it remains until today,[115] actively promoting also the Basque nationalism.

In 1919 he took part in Magna Junta Carlista de Biarritz[117] and set up a new Carlist weekly Radica,[118] representing the movement first in the Pamplona ayuntamiento and in the 1920s in the Deputación Foral.

[135] His stance towards unification is highly unclear,[136] though it soon evolved into opposition;[137] contesting Carlist amalgamation into Movimiento,[138] he brusquely rejected Franco's blandishments.

[151] Some scholars claim that they engineered a plot to remove Fal,[152] though his actual dismissal and new course adopted by Carlism suited the competing "unionistas"[153] faction more.

[154] Though they lent some support to Carlos Hugo[155] and maintained cordial relations with the Carlist claimant Don Javier until the late 1960s,[156] they confronted the progressives when power struggle erupted within Carlism in the mid-1960s.

[157] The last success of the Baleztenas was regaining control over El Pensamiento Navarro in 1970,[158] a short-lived victory[159] as early 1970s Ignacio was expulsed from the socialist-dominated Partido Carlista.