Santiago de Chile (EFE).- International experts delivered this Wednesday to magistrate Paola Plaza a report with crucial information on the death of Chilean Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda and that, according to what his family exclusively told EFE, would show that he was “poisoned” twelve days after the 1973 military coup.
The delivery of the report, carried out by experts from Canada, Denmark and Chile, was made by the coordinator of the panel of experts, Gloria Ramírez, with great expectation.
The full report, including annexes, bibliographies and other documents, is scheduled to be delivered on March 7.
The poet’s nephew, Rodolfo Reyes, who had access to the documents because he was a plaintiff in the case, leaked to EFE on Monday that forensics concluded that the “clostridium botulinum” found in the writer’s remains “was in his body at the time of death” and that the corpse was not contaminated afterwards when it was buried.
“We now know that ‘clostridium botulinum’ had no reason to have been in Neruda’s skeleton. What does this mean? That Neruda was assassinated, there was an intervention in 1973 by state agents, ”Reyes said in his office.
The bacteria that calls into question the official version
Neruda died on the night of September 23, 1973 at the Santa María Clinic, in downtown Santiago, twelve days after the coup that overthrew his friend and president Salvador Allende and one day before he went into exile in Mexico, where he could have become the great opponent of the dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).
The bacterium was found in 2017 in a Neruda tooth by another panel of experts, which dismissed the version of the dictatorship and rejected that the cause of death was “cachexia” (extreme weakness) caused by advanced prostate cancer that afflicted him. since 1969.
Clostridium botulinum, responsible for botulism, is a bacillus that is generally found in soil and can cause nervous system problems and even death.
The unknown remains how or who introduced the botulinum toxin into the body of the author of “Twenty love poems and a song of despair.”
Neruda’s driver theory
A large part of Neruda’s family supports the version of Manuel Araya, his former driver and one of the last people to see him alive. According to Araya, whose testimony was the basis of the complaint made by the Communist Party and gave rise to the investigation in 2011, the poet was poisoned by an injection in the abdomen by a secret agent of the regime who posed as a doctor.
The conclusions of this new expert report were to be known on February 3, but the hearing was canceled due to connection problems by one of the experts.
It was rescheduled for February 6, but it also had to be suspended due to alleged disagreements between the experts.
“We are satisfied and sad, because now we know that they killed him. Previously, one assumed things, but this investigation revealed the truth: Neruda was killed,” Reyes concluded on Monday.