A new report on the remains of Pablo Neruda hypothesizes that the great Chilean poet, who died on August 23, 1973 at the Santa María Clinic in Santiago de Chile, was poisoned twelve days after the military coup by General Augusto Pinochet. which put an end to the experience of President Salvador Allende. The analyzes carried out by a group of international researchers have revealed the presence of a highly toxic toxin, the “Clostridium botulinum”, which would have quickly led to her death.
“We now know that ‘Clostridium botulinum’ should not have been present in Neruda’s bones and that is why he was murdered by Chilean state agents in 1973,” the Nobel Prize winner’s grandson, lawyer Rodolfo Reyes, told the Chilean press, awaiting the official results of the analyzes to be announced tomorrow, Wednesday 15 February.
The botulinum bacterium was first identified in a molar of the poet in 2017 by a group of experts who put forward the poisoning hypothesis and challenged the official version, which speaks of Neruda’s death from a metastatic prostate tumor. Rodolfo Reyes therefore considers the hypothesis repeatedly repeated by the Chilean Communist Party to be plausible, according to which Neruda was killed “with an injection that poisoned him”.
“I can say it because I know the reports. I say it as a lawyer and nephew with a lot of responsibility because the judge can’t say it yet because he has to have all the information,” Reyes told Spanish newspaper El País. “We’ve been waiting for this, because the 2017 panel of experts had already found ‘Clostridium botulinum’. But it was not known whether it was endogenous or exogenous. In other words, whether it was internal or external. And now it’s proven that it was endogenous and that it was injected or placed.”
The story of the poisoning death of Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) has been recorded for at least ten years, and since then, repeated forensic investigations with judicial investigations opened and closed have failed to formulate a clear verdict on the death. Now the nephew, who never abandoned the official version, has announced the turning point.
In 2013, a group of coroners, in agreement with the Chilean judicial authorities, subjected the body of the Nobel Prize to a series of lengthy examinations to verify the reliability of the testimony of its driver and bodyguard, Manuel Araya, according to which the poet he would be by the will a few days after the coup d’état murdered by a mysterious injection by General Pinochet in the Santa Maria Clinic in Santiago. The head of Chile’s forensic medicine service, Patricio Bustos, then had Neruda’s body analyzed and concluded that the poet had died of prostate cancer, the course of which would have been accelerated by the emotional strain of the days of the coup. No toxic substance was then found in the body, except traces of drugs and painkillers taken to fight cancer, while there were many metastases in the bones.
In January 2015, the poet’s nephew obtained a supplementary examination and the reopening of the preliminary investigation with new scientific research on the biological findings taken from the corpse in the spring of 2013, in order to look for certain chemical substances or deadly heavy metals in a short time in a weakened organism. In May 2015, a Spanish team announced the discovery of abnormal proteins in Neruda’s bones that are not related to drugs, some linked to cancer and others to sudden and very rapid infection.
That investigation was also dropped, but amid lingering doubts, the Chilean government set up two scientific commissions, which authored a document in November 2015 stating that it is likely that Neruda did not “died of prostate cancer” and that ” third party intervention is clearly possible and very likely,” concluding that the patient was “given an injection or something orally administered that accelerated his prognosis in just six hours.”
In February 2016, Chilean judge Mario Carroza, who ordered the exhumation of Pablo Neruda’s body, ruled that the custody of the remains available to the court until then could not be extended and ordered their return to the family. In April 2016, Pablo Neruda’s remains were reinterred on Isla Negra on Chile’s central coast, where his house-museum is located next to the grave of his wife Matilde Urrutia. The body of the author of “I confess that I have lived” had already arrived in the garden of the poet’s last residence in 1992, having previously rested in the cemetery of Santiago de Chile.
In the fall of 2017, a pool of experts examined the remains of the Chilean poet again and the result of the new examinations was announced by Professor Aurelio Luna of the Spanish University of Murcia, who had coordinated the work of an international team of 16 doctors: “Contrary to what is stated in the official According to the certificates, it was not prostate cancer that caused Neruda’s death.” “We cannot yet rule out or confirm the natural or violent cause of Pablo Neruda’s death – explained Aurelio Luna during a conference in Santiago de Chile – but the basic conclusion is the invalidity of the death certificate”. In the months that followed, tests revealed the presence of the bacterium “Clostridium botulinum” found in one of the poet’s molars, which was later confirmed by other tests, allowing the case to be brought back to court. The results of the assessments carried out by the international experts should be published tomorrow, Wednesday 15 February, when the report will be handed over to Judge Paola Plaza. However, the information provided by the experts is not binding on the judge’s decision.
The last group of experts responsible for the expertise must determine whether the origin of the identified substance is endogenous or exogenous in nature. This third panel of experts is made up of scientists from Canada, Mexico, El Salvador, Denmark, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Canada and Chile. Two laboratories, one in Canada and one in Denmark, conducted the tests.