Neruda poisoned? Answer now hinges on a single verdict

NEW DELHI/SANTIAGO: For years, doubt and intrigue has 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 judgment.

Neruda died in Chile’s Santiago, 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.

“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 around 3,200 people.

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.