The death of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda days after Chile’s 1973 military coup should be reinvestigated, an appeals court ruled on Tuesday, saying that new steps could help clarify what killed the poet.
In December last year, a judge rejected a request by Neruda’s nephew to reopen the case to look for causes other than cancer, which was listed on his death certificate.
The nephew, Rodolfo Reyes, said that forensic experts from Canada, Denmark and Chile had found evidence suggesting that Neruda had been poisoned.
Photo: AP
Forensic tests carried out in Danish and Canadian labs indicated Neruda’s body had “a great quantity of Cloristridium botulinum, which is incompatible with human life,” Reyes said.
The toxin can cause nervous system paralysis and death.
The ruling was the latest turn in one of the great debates of post-coup Chile. The long-stated official position has been that Neruda died of complications from prostate cancer, but his driver argued for decades that he was poisoned.
In the December ruling, the judge said that the forensic results had already been carried out or were “late,” and did not lead anywhere.
Several years earlier, other international forensics experts had already rejected the official cause of death as cachexia, or weakness and wasting of the body due to chronic illness — in his case, cancer — but at that time they said they had not determined what did kill Neruda.
On Tuesday, the appeals court in Santiago unanimously revoked the judge’s resolution and ordered that the procedures requested by the nephew be done.
The steps include a calligraphic analysis of the death certificate, a meta-analysis of the test results carried out by foreign agencies, and subpoenas for statements from Chile’s documentation project and an expert on C botulinum.
Neruda, best known for his love poems and winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, was a Communist Party member and friend of then-Chilean president Salvador Allende, whose government was toppled in the coup that put General Augusto Pinochet in power. Allende killed himself rather than surrender.
Neruda 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 Santiago, where he died on Sept. 23, 1973.
Suspicions that the dictatorship had a hand in his death have remained long after Chile returned to democracy in 1990.
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