Chile will once again try to solve the mystery of the death, in 1973, of the poet and Nobel Prize winner for literature Pablo Neruda. He could have been poisoned under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, according to a ruling from the Santiago Court of Appeal published Tuesday February 20.
“The reopening of the investigation is ordered in order to carry out the procedures” requested by the complainants, which “could contribute to the clarification of the facts”, details the Court of Appeal of the Chilean capital in its judgment.
The reopening of the investigation was requested by relatives of the poet, including a nephew, as well as by the Communist Party, of which the 1971 Nobel Prize winner for literature was a prominent member.
See alsoChile: the official version of the death of Pablo Neruda scientifically contradicted
The judgment of the Court of Appeal thus annuls the order closing the investigation into the causes of his death taken in December by the judge in charge of the case, Paola Plaza.
Pablo Neruda died on September 23, 1973, twelve days after General Pinochet's putsch against the socialist president Salvador Allende, a great friend of the poet.
A “meta-expertise to review and interpret the experts’ results”
The hypothesis of an assassination appeared in 2011 after the revelations of Manuel Araya, who died in June 2023, at the time a young activist whom the Chilean Communist Party had designated as the writer's assistant and driver.
According to this theory of poisoning, Pablo Neruda would have died from an injection given the day before his departure for Mexico, where he planned to go into exile to lead the opposition to the Pinochet regime (1973-1990).
Until then, the official version was that the poet died of prostate cancer. But international experts unanimously rejected this version of the military regime in 2017, without however confirming or excluding the possibility of voluntary and deliberate contamination by the injection of germs or bacterial toxins.
Among the new measures ordered Tuesday by the courts is a “meta-expertise to review and interpret the results of the experts” who analyzed the remains taken from the exhumed body of the poet.
A panel of national and international experts was called in 2023 to definitively conclude the investigation. They had analyzed the results of a whole series of samples from the remains of the poet, whose body was exhumed in April 2013 from the crypt where he had rested since 1992, on Isla Negra, 120 kilometers west of the capital.
“New analysis of the writing of the death certificate”
Their conclusions were submitted in February 2023 to Judge Paola Plaza. Two members of the panel from Canadian McMaster University, Hendrik and Debi Poinar, assured that they could not determine whether or not Neruda's death was due to poisoning.
The two researchers specified that they were able to recover Pablo Neruda's DNA on one of his molars but, due to its degradation, only managed to reconstruct a third of the genome of the bacterium clostridium botulinum – responsible for botulism. , a potentially lethal paralytic disease.
However, they assured that it was possible to reconstruct it in its entirety without further exhumation. “There is enough material to do it with what we have in the laboratory. We just need to have the agreement of the court,” they assured AFP.
Among other measures ordered by the Santiago Court of Appeal is "a new analysis of the handwriting of the death certificate allegedly issued by Doctor Vargas Salazar", which states that Neruda died from metastases caused by the prostate cancer from which he suffered.
New witnesses and an expert in the study of the bacteria clostridium botulinum, which would have been inoculated into Neruda, are also summoned to appear.
The dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet left some 3,200 dead and more than 38,000 people tortured, according to official figures.
With AFP
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