Two of the experts who investigated the death of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, which occurred in 1973, said Thursday that the presence of bacteria in the writer’s body does not mean that he died of poisoning.
Clostridium botulinum bacteria “was present at the time of her death, but we still don’t know why. We just know that it shouldn’t have been there,” said Hendrik and Debi Poinar, of McMaster University in Canada. in statements to Agence France-Presse.
Both are part of the panel of international experts that investigated the possible poisoning of Pablo Neruda, and whose conclusions were delivered on Wednesday to the Chilean judge in charge of the case, Paola Plaza.
On Wednesday, at a press conference, the judge explained that the expert report will be analyzed for the court to rule on the case.
On Monday, the family of Pablo Neruda said that the investigation by forensic specialists had determined that the poet died of poisoning 50 years ago, by a bacterium found in the remains.
“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. .
Researchers Hendrik and Debi Opinar were less incisive in linking the presence of the bacteria and the writer’s death from poisoning in 1973.
The death of Pablo Neruda, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, is 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 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.”
A large part of Neruda’s family supports the version of the poet’s driver, Manuel Araya, according to which he 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 de Chili.
Pablo Neruda died on September 23, 1973, just 12 days after the coup d’état with which Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government of Salvador Allende.
Source: TSF
