Ten years after the exhumation of poet Pablo Neruda, an unrequited death

Neruda died on September 23, 1973, a few days after the military coup that overthrew the government of the poet’s close friend, Salvador Allende; He died in a clinic in Santiago, hoping to travel to Mexico, where he never went.

In 2011, the Chilean Communist Party, of which the poet was a member, filed a complaint upon learning, in the words of the author’s driver, that Pablo Neruda was in good health days before and hours after his death. The injection in the abdomen got worse. The legal process led to his grave being exhumed two years later.

boring research

An initial forensic analysis in 2013 found no poison among Pablo Neruda’s remains, but a later report in 2017 revealed the presence of the bacteria. Clostridium botulinum in a tooth that can cause botulism, a deadly human disease.

While the poet’s poisoning has not yet been officially determined, there is a third forensic report that Judge Paola Plaza says will be the “last” to learn Neruda’s causes of death.

Read more: Pablo Neruda and an unknown letter to Paraguay

According to the poet’s family, who knew the details of the cause, this third explanation would reveal that “bacter.” Clostridium botulinum It shouldn’t have been in Neruda’s skeleton.”

The poet’s cousin, Rodolfo Reyes, reported last February that experts concluded in the third forensic report that the bacteria “did not enter Neruda’s body from inside or around his coffin,” but that he already had these bacteria before he died.

He will be known as the “victim of the military coup”.

Spanish Francisco Etxeberria, one of the forensic officers involved in the exhumation of Neruda’s tomb and the initial analyzes of his remains, claimed that if the interviewed poet was poisoned, he should be considered a “victim of the 1973 military coup “.

“Added to their past pathology is the stress of knowing that their country was hit by a coup, that their close friend, Salvador Allende, committed suicide in the Palacio de la Moneda – which was also bombed – and that they lost their friends. knowing that the same fate could befall him…” the coroner said.

Etxeberria recalled that before his death the poet had suffered from advanced prostate cancer with a urinary tract infection, but that he would nevertheless have lived longer if the military coup had not disturbed the peace of his life.

In case he had not been poisoned, the coroner has a hypothesis: “Had it not been for a military coup, Neruda would have survived several months, we do not know how many months, but he certainly would not have died on September 23, 1973 . The blow may have been the deciding factor in his death.”

Ten years after he began investigating the cause of his death, Pablo Neruda lies where he was exhumed, a few feet from the waves of the sea hitting the rocks where the poet prayed to be buried alive. : “Comrades, bury me on Isla Negra / for the sea I know, in every rough land of stone / and in waves my lost eyes / will never see again”.