Crime & Justice

Court orders reopening of investigation into Neruda’s post-coup death

Santiago de Chile, Feb 20 (EFE). – A Santiago Court of Appeals decided to reopen the investigation into the death of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, which occurred 12 days after the coup led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973, the Nobel laureate’s family, the plaintiff in the case, told EFE.

“The investigation has not been exhausted and there are precise steps that could contribute to the clarification of the facts (…) the reopening of the investigation is ordered,” the court said in a unanimous decision published Monday night.

The judge in charge of the investigation, Paola Plaza, who had to determine whether the Nobel laureate died of advanced prostate cancer or was poisoned by a secret agent of the dictatorship, closed the investigation on Sept. 25, 2023, and refused to reopen it in December.

Neruda’s family and the Communist Party, in which he had been active since his youth, appealed the decision.

“The unanimity of the decision is a confirmation of our appeal. We have managed to remove the tombstone they wanted to put on this investigation. We have been fighting for 14 years to clarify Neruda’s death,” Elizabeth Flores, the family’s lawyer, told EFE.

“This decision is very important because it confirms our accusations and our background information that in the context in which the death occurred, there was an intervention by the state terrorist apparatus of the civil-military dictatorship,” Juan Andrés Lagos, in charge of political relations for the Communist Party, told EFE.

The author of “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” died on Sept. 23, 1973, at the Santa María Clinic in Santiago, one day before he was supposed to leave for exile in Mexico.

The poisoning theory was first put forward publicly by the poet’s chauffeur and personal secretary, Manuel Araya, who died in June 2023 and was one of the last people to see Neruda alive.

His testimony was the basis of the complaint filed by the Communist Party – supported by part of the family – that led to the 2011 investigation, which must now be reopened.

“The truth takes time to come out, but it does so little by little. It is a great achievement in the justice we have been asking for years for my uncle Pablo,” Rodolfo Reyes, plaintiff and nephew of the poet, told EFE.

The investigation, which involved three panels of international experts, took a turn in 2017 when the second group of specialists rejected the official version, which pointed to prostate cancer as the cause of death, and found “clostridium botulinum” in the poet’s teeth.

“Clostridium botulinum” is a bacillus-type bacterium that produces a neurotoxin responsible for botulism, a severe disease in humans and other animals, and is normally found in soil.

A third panel of experts from the universities of McMaster (Canada) and Copenhagen (Denmark) revealed a year ago that the bacterium was “in his body at the time of death”, which for the family was interpreted as irrefutable proof that Neruda was “poisoned” during his stay in the clinic.

“Neruda has been screaming since 2017 that his body has ‘clostridium botulinum’ and that it came to him through the intervention of third parties,” stressed the lawyer Flores.

However, it is not known whether the botulinum toxin, which is often found in poorly preserved canned foods, entered the body in a natural way or in a deliberate way.

In Monday’s ruling, the First Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals also ordered several procedures requested by the plaintiffs, such as a handwriting analysis of the death certificate and the taking of new statements.

For the family, the most important diligence is a “meta-expertise to verify and interpret the results of the experts from McMaster and Copenhagen Universities, which should only be carried out by experts proposed by these institutions”.

Reyes explained that the judge in the case had asked various Chilean universities to interpret last year’s expert report, but that these “do not have the knowledge or experience to do so” and that Canada and Denmark are the “leading” countries in this type of forensic analysis. EFE

mmm/mcd/ics

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