New Delhi/Santiago For years, doubt and intrigue have surrounded the death of Chilean poet and lawmaker Pablo Neruda. Many, including his nephew Rodolfo Reyes, believed that he was poisoned. Now, 50 years since the Nobel Laureate’s death, Reyes could come very close to being — at least, partially — vindicated, and it all hinges on one judgement.
Neruda died 12 days after the violent military coup in which General Augusto Pinochet, then the commander of the army, ousted socialist President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973 with help from the United States. The timing of his death raised suspicions that the dictatorship had a hand in it. Doubt remained long after Chile returned to democracy in 1990.
A panel of scientific experts investigating the poet’s mysterious death delivered a report to Chilean judge Paola Plaza on Wednesday. The report will be reviewed by judges in closed hearings ahead of a legally binding ruling on the poet’s death, finally putting an end to all speculations.
Reports in the press this week claimed the report found he had been injected with a deadly substance, and did not die from prostate cancer, as the government had claimed upon his death in 1973, aged 69.
“The court had no knowledge of the content of this report until today,” Plaza said in a press conference, distancing herself from press reports that claimed Neruda was killed by a highly toxic bacteria.
“I cannot take responsibility for what is circulating in the press,” said Plaza, who is heading an investigation that began more than a decade ago.
According to the New York Times, which has reviewed the summary of the findings, experts confirmed that bacteria was present in Neruda’s body, but they couldn’t determine whether it was a “toxic strain of the bacteria” nor how it got into his body: whether it was injected or entered his body through contaminated food.
However, they did say there was other “circumstantial evidence” to support the theory that he was murdered, including that the Pinochet regime had indeed poisoned political prisoners with the bacteria that was possibly similar in strain to the one found in Neruda’s body.
Pinochet, who ruled Chile for 17 years, oversaw a regime that killed some 3,200 leftist activists and other suspected opponents. The dictator died in 2006 at age 91 without ever being convicted for crimes committed by his regime.
Who was Neruda?
Neruda was a celebrated poet, politician, diplomat and bohemian figure, and also a prominent member of the Chilean Communist Party.
He was best known for his love poems and was a friend of Allende, who killed himself rather than surrender to troops during the coup.
Neruda was traumatised by the military takeover and the persecution and killing of his friends. He planned to go into exile in Mexico, where he would have been an influential voice against the dictatorship.
But a day before his planned departure, he was taken by ambulance to a clinic in Chile’s capital of Santiago where he had been treated for cancer and other ailments. Neruda officially died there September 23, 1973, from natural causes.
During his life, Neruda accumulated dozens of prizes, including the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, “for a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams,” in the words of the award committee. But in recent years criticism has appeared from feminist groups over a rape he committed in the 1930s and which he recounted in his book I Confess That I Have Lived. He also is criticized for abandoning his only daughter, Malva Marina, because she was born with hydrocephalus.
A mysterious death
The long-stated official position has been that Neruda died of complications from prostate cancer, but the poet’s driver and personal assistant Manuel Araya argued for decades that he was poisoned.
An investigation into the cause of the death first began in 2011 when Araya asserted that the poet was given a mysterious injection in his chest just before he died.
Neruda’s body was exhumed in 2013 to determine the cause of his death but those tests showed no toxic agents or poisons in his bone. His family and driver demanded further investigation.
In 2015, Chile’s government said it was “highly probable that a third party” was responsible for Neruda’s death. Neruda was reburied in his favourite home overlooking the Pacific Coast last year.
In 2017, a team of international scientists determined that Neruda did not die of cancer or malnutrition, rejecting the official cause of death but not saying what he did die of.
“The fundamental conclusions are the invalidity of the death certificate when it comes to cachexia as a cause of death,” Aurelio Luna, one of the panel’s experts, said at that time. “We still can’t exclude nor affirm the natural or violent cause of Pablo Neruda’s death.”
Then a probe was launched into a toxic bacterium called Clostridium botulinum that was found in Neruda’s body.
The former Mexican ambassador to Chile at the time of the bloody military coup, Gonzalo MartÃnez Corbalá, told AP on two occasions that he saw Neruda the day before his death and that his body weight was close to 100 kilos (220 pounds). MartÃnez spoke to AP by phone in 2017, a few days before his death.
Araya told AP last month he still thinks that if Neruda “hadn’t been left alone in the clinic, they wouldn’t have killed him.”
He recalled that on Neruda’s instructions, on Sunday, Sept. 23, the poet’s wife, Matilde Urrutia, and he were at the mansion to pick up the suitcases that would be taken to Mexico the following day. In the middle of the afternoon Neruda asked them to come back quickly. He died that same night.
Rodolfo Reyes, a lawyer and nephew of Neruda’s, claimed earlier this week that he had had access to the report and that its results were sufficient to confirm his uncle was poisoned.
“Of course this bacteria is a biological weapon that was injected into Pablo Neruda, and he died a few hours later,” Reyes told AFP.
But Bernardo Reyes, a grand nephew, dismissed this theory, telling AFP that “the scientific conclusion will not be able to” determine a murder.
“Notwithstanding that in 1973 there was still not, in the dictatorship, a development of assassinations using chemical methods.”
He said those relatives claiming otherwise “do not represent the family.”
The report’s coordinator, Dr Gloria Ramirez, made no comment on Reyes’ speculation about its findings, whose presentation to the court was delayed twice. It has not been made public because of judicial rules governing the inquiry.
Judge Plaza, who is overseeing the case, said there is no deadline on delivering a verdict.