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Pablo Neruda’s poisoning theory has been circulating in Chile for more than a decade. Scientists from a Canadian laboratory who studied his skeletal remains could not determine if the bacteria found on his body killed the Chilean poet.
The scientific experts delivered a report to the judge who will review their conclusions before issuing a decision. Although they detected the presence of botulism bacteria in Neruda’s remains, they cannot confirm that it was intentionally introduced into her body.
The Clostridium botulinum bacterium “was there at the time of his death, but we still don’t know why. We just know that it shouldn’t be there,” Hendrik and Debi Poinar of McMaster University (Canada) told AFP in an exchange. written.
The scientists confirmed their statements in a paper published on Wednesday by McMaster University in Canada, stating that until now “they could not conclude whether the ‘C.botulinum’ strain found in Neruda’s remains killed him, nor whether it was intentionally used to murder him.”
The researchers are part of the international panel of scientific experts convened by the Chilean justice in the cause of the death of Neruda, which occurred on September 23, 1973.
The panel, which worked with the studies from the McMaster laboratories and the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), delivered its conclusions on Wednesday to the Chilean judge Paola Plaza, in charge of the case, who said that she will study it in reserve as part of a research phase.
Hendrik and Debi Poinar maintained that at the request of the Chilean courts, they worked for four years to determine the presence and relevance of the bacteria in Neruda’s body when he died in a clinic in Santiago.
future studies
The researchers claimed that they recovered enough DNA from a Neruda tooth that, due to degradation, they could only reconstruct a third of the Clostridium botulinum genome in question.
However, that work can be completed in the future without doing a new exhumation.
“There is enough material to do it now with what is left in the laboratory. We just need to know that the court agrees with that,” the experts stressed.
Only with a new study could it be determined if it is part of a group of pathogenic bacteria or not, regardless of the strain to which it corresponds.
Hendrik Poinar is a Swedish evolutionary geneticist who was a student of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine Svante Pääbo and one of the researchers who succeeded in 2015 in cracking the complete DNA code, or genome, of two woolly mammoths.
According to the official version, Neruda, 69 years old and a well-known communist militant, died as a presumed consequence of prostate cancer.
His death occurred 12 days after the military coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende and imposed a dictatorship headed by Augusto Pinochet.
The skills
The judicial investigation into the death of Neruda, the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, began after his former driver, Manuel Araya, told the press in 2011 that the poet could have been poisoned by the Pinochet dictatorship, which left more than 3,200 dead and Some 38,000 tortured, according to official figures.
Araya held this Thursday at a press conference that Neruda was not sick enough to be admitted to a clinic on September 19, 1973, but that it was a strategy to go into exile in Mexico.
“It was for security. On September 14 there were warships near Pablo Neruda’s house in Isla Negra. The military surrounded our house. So the problem was how we got Pablo Neruda out of the house,” Manuel Araya said.
After years of expertise and scientific studies, in 2017 a group of Chilean and foreign experts assured that the author of the “Canto general” did not die of cancer, although the panel could not determine the cause of death.
For this reason, studies were requested from laboratories in Denmark and Canada, one of the most advanced in its field, to shed light and try to clarify Neruda’s death.
Neruda’s nephew, Rodolfo Reyes, who has assured without further evidence that it is proven that his uncle died poisoned by a bacterium, told the press this Thursday that he hopes that justice will be ruled during 2023, when the 50th anniversary of the death will be fulfilled. of the Chilean poet.
“It has to be this year. The death of Pablo Neruda can no longer be covered up. That is already in sight and there are definite reports. Now (has to come) the conclusion and the study of the minister (judge) Paola Plaza,” he claimed.
