The forensic experts determined that the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda died of poisoning 50 years ago, and they hope to deliver the expert report this Wednesday, the writer’s family revealed.
International experts will reveal that the bacteria found in the remains of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 “was in his body at the time of his death”, which will show that he was “poisoned” 12 days after the 1973 military coup.
“Now we know that there should not have been ‘clostridium botulinum’ in Neruda’s skeleton. What does that mean? That Neruda was assassinated, that there was intervention by state agents in 1973,” said Rodolfo Reyes, the poet’s nephew, in statements to Eph. .
This revelation is the latest twist in one of the great debates in post-coup Chile. The long-standing official position is that Neruda died of complications from prostate cancer, but the writer’s former driver, Manuel Araya, argued for decades that he had been poisoned.
The bacterium, responsible for botulism, was found in 2017 in one of Neruda’s molars by another panel of scientists, who at the time immediately rejected the version of the dictatorship, denying that the cause of the poet’s death was advanced cancer. of the prostate that he had suffered from since 1969.
The ‘Clostridium botulinum’ is a bacillus that is normally found in the soil, but experts from McMaster University (Canada) and the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) concluded, in the report to be presented this week, that “it did not infiltrate Neruda’s body through his coffin”, but that he already had it before he died.
The question that remains is how and by whom the botulinum toxin was introduced into the body of the author of “Twenty love poems and a song of despair.”
“Neruda’s fatal bullet was found, it was in his body. Who shot it? This will be seen shortly, but there is no doubt that Neruda was assassinated, due to the direct intervention of third parties”, stressed Rodolfo Reyes.
A large part of Neruda’s family supports Manuel Araya’s version, according to which the poet was poisoned by an injection in the abdomen, by a secret agent of the regime who posed as a doctor at the Santa María Clinic in Santiago.
“Neruda was not seriously ill, he just had cancer. He was having a hard time, he was suffering, but he was not prepared to die,” family lawyer Elizabeth Flores, who is acting as a plaintiff in the case that began in 2011, told Efe along with the Communist Party, of which Neruda was a member.
Rodolfo Reyes recalled that the writer, whose remains were exhumed in 2013 from his garden in Isla Negra, on the central coast of Chile, had planned to travel to Mexico a few days before his death, at the age of 69, and that in exile he had become the “great adversary” of General Augusto Pinochet.
There has been no confirmation of Reyes’ comments by forensic experts from Canada, Denmark and Chile, who will release the report on Neruda’s cause of death publicly.
The conclusions of this new report should have been presented on February 3, but the hearing was canceled twice – first due to technical failures and then due to alleged discrepancies between experts – and rescheduled for February 15.
Pablo Neruda died on September 23, 1973 at the Santa María Clinic in Santiago de Chile, barely 12 days after the coup d’état with which Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government of Salvador Allende.
Source: TSF
