( Spanish) — This Wednesday, in Santiago de Chile, the conclusions of the preliminary report of the international experts who seek to elucidate what was the true cause of death of the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, Pablo Neruda, and if there was intervention by third parties, will be revealed.
Until now, it was thought that the Chilean poet and communist militant had died of prostate cancer on September 23, 1973, at the Santa María Clinic in Santiago, twelve days after Augusto Pinochet’s coup. However, the story took a turn in 2011, when the Chilean Communist Party filed a complaint to investigate the facts after Neruda’s driver, Manuel Araya, claimed that he was murdered.
According to Araya’s version, Neruda arrived at the Santa María Clinic on September 19, 1973, prior to a scheduled trip to Mexico. “Neruda had controlled cancer, for 10 or 8 more years of life. He was not sick to die. He suffered from one leg, he had phlebitis, then suddenly he was limping,” explained the writer’s former assistant in an interview with the “La Red” channel in 2013.
“On September 23, I left with Matilde (Urrutia, Neruda’s wife) at 8:30 in the morning to Isla Negra to look for Neruda’s luggage for the trip, and Neruda calls us at four in the afternoon. , says: ‘While sleeping inside, the doctor gave me an injection in my stomach, come quickly,’” Araya said.
Upon arriving at the clinic, the driver stated that Neruda was “very reddish, very feverish” and that a local doctor sent him to buy medicine. That was the last time he saw him alive. Subsequently, Araya was approached by unknown persons and transferred as a detainee to the National Stadium.
(Credit: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The key: the discovery of a bacterium
In 2013, 40 years after his death, the body of Pablo Neruda was exhumed from his garden in Isla Negra to carry out the investigation, but the first tests revealed the absence of “relevant chemical agents.”
However, in 2017, a new panel of international experts determined that the poet did not die of prostate cancer and that the presence of the “clostridium botulinum” bacterium had been found in a molar, a bacillus found in the ground and is responsible for botulism, as reported by the affiliate Chile.
“One does not catch a bacterium that is cultivated in laboratories for the purpose of biological weapons walking down the street,” said one of the experts who carried out the investigation, Aurelio Luna, in a press conference in 2017.
The expert reports continued under this new edge by scientists from Canada, Denmark, Chile and the United States, who sought to resolve how the botulinum toxin reached the body of the author of “I confess that I have lived.”
After several delays as a result of the covid-19 pandemic, the conclusions of the latest panel of experts will finally be released in a preliminary report this Wednesday in the Chilean Judiciary.
