A new expert report concludes that Neruda was “poisoned by agents of the State” of Chile

The family of the Chilean poet and politician, Pablo Nerudawho died in 1973 as a consequence of advanced prostate cancer, has ensured that was “poisoned by agents of the State” of Chile. The relatives have advanced the conclusions of a new international expert report who found a bacterium in the remains of the Nobel laureate, which may prove that he was “poisoned” 12 days after the 1973 military coup.

The report, which will be officially presented this Wednesday, reveals, as explained by Rodolfo Reyes, the writer’s lawyer and nephew, that the bacteria found (‘clostridium botulinum’) “did not leak into Neruda’s corpse from inside or around his coffin.” , but he already had it before he died.

This new research has been carried out by experts from McMaster University (Canada) and the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), and comes to validate another from 2017 carried out by another panel of experts, who also dismissed the version of the dictatorship and rejected that the cause of death was advanced prostate cancer that had afflicted him since 1969.

The conclusions of this new expert report were to be known on February 3, but the hearing was canceled twice —first due to technical defects and then due to alleged disagreements between the experts— and rescheduled for February 15.

“Clostridium botulinum” is a bacillus that is generally found in soil, but was found in “great quantity” in one of the poet’s molars.

“That should never have been in the skeleton, in Neruda’s body, and that was injected. So, as a lawyer, it makes me say that Neruda was eliminated in Chile. Who? We don’t know yet. That’s going to know, and of course it had to be State agents”, Reyes assured, in which he recalled that the poet was an opinion leader in 1973 and “was a public danger to” the dictator Pinochet.

The unknown remains how and who introduced the toxin botulinum in the body of the author of “Twenty love poems and a song of despair”. A large part of Neruda’s family supports the version of Manuel Araya, his former driver and who maintains that he was poisoned by an injection in the abdomen by a secret agent of the regime who posed as a doctor at the Santa María Clinic. in Santiago.

“Neruda was not seriously ill, he just had cancer. He walked with difficulty, he was in pain, but he was not ready to die,” said Elizabeth Flores, a family lawyer, who is acting as a plaintiff in the case that began in 2011 with the Communist Party, in which Neruda was a member.

For his part, Reyes recalled that the writer, whose remains were exhumed in 2013 from his garden in Isla Negra, with the participation of the Basque coroner Paco Etxeberria, had planned to travel to Mexico a few days before he died, at the age of 69, and that in exile he would have become the “great opponent” of General Augusto Pinochet.

The Chilean writer, who was then part of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, died on September 23, 1973, two weeks after the coup that overthrew the socialist president Salvador Allende.