Death, Inside the Bones’
Chile
World-renowned Chilean poet and Nobel Prize laureate Pablo Neruda died of poisoning just days after the 1973 coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, according to a recent forensic report that challenges the state’s long-held position about the writer’s death as having been “natural”, Quartz reported.
An international forensic team delivered the report to a top Chilean judge this week after examining bone and tooth samples from Neruda’s exhumed body.
Neruda’s nephew Rodolfo Reyes shared some of the details of the report, saying that scientists found clostridium botulinum while examining Neruda’s remains, a neurotoxin they said caused the poet’s death.
He added that the findings validate what he has been saying for 50 years – that his uncle was poisoned in a hospital shortly after the coup that removed socialist President Salvador Allende, NPR added.
The report – which will become available to the public next month – challenges the official version that Neruda died of prostate cancer. There have been suggestions that Pinochet poisoned Neruda – an ally of Allende – to prevent a political challenge from the left-wing writer, a critic and member of the communist party.
Public pressure over the cause of death increased in 2011 when the writer’s driver publicly recounted Neruda telling him that he had been injected with a foreign substance into his stomach just hours before his death.
Neruda’s relatives are hoping to open a criminal investigation into his death, which observers say would make him one of more than 40,000 political dissidents who were brutally tortured and murdered during Pinochet’s tenure.
