“Neruda was a danger to Pinochet”: the poet’s driver

Santiago, Chile (EFE) listed advanced prostate cancer as the cause of death.

“Neruda was a danger to Pinochet. Remember the Spanish war and the refugees he took with him in Winnipeg. Pinochet was not interested in him leaving the country for any reason,” Araya said at a press conference.

The statements by the driver and Neruda’s right-hand man come one day after international experts handed over to the judge in the case a crucial report on the bacteria found in 2017 in the poet’s remains and which, according to the family’s advance to EFE, is a conclusive proof that he was poisoned.

The author of “Twenty love poems and a desperate song” died on September 23, 1973 at the Santa María Clinic in Santiago, 12 days after the coup that overthrew his friend and president Salvador Allende and one day before go into exile in Mexico.

Araya, one of the last people to see the poet alive, explained that Neruda was in “good health” but that he decided to enter the clinic to protect himself from the regime, which had surrounded his house in Isla Negra, a town in the Chilean coast 110 kilometers from Santiago.

“Neruda was lucid, happy because he was going to Mexico to ask the world for help,” he stressed.

Neruda: “I’m burning”

Araya has always maintained that taking advantage of his absence and that of Matile Urrutia, Neruda’s wife, a doctor entered the room and gave the poet an injection in the belly.

“When I arrive from Isla Negra, he tells me: ‘Manuel, I’m burning inside.’ I went up to him and saw a red spot, like when you get a puncture,” the driver recalled.

Araya’s testimony was the basis of the denunciation of the Communist Party – in which Neruda had been a member since he was young – that gave rise to the current investigation.

The poet’s nephew, Rodolfo Reyes, who had access to the expert documents as 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.

For the family, this irrefutably demonstrates the poisoning, although the magistrate in the case, Paola Plaza, stated on Wednesday that the expert report is “important” evidence, but that “it is the joint analysis of the evidence collected that leads the court to a resolution.”

The bacterium, responsible for botulism, was found in 2017 in a Neruda tooth by another panel of experts, who dismissed the version of the dictatorship and rejected that the cause of death was “cachexia” (extreme weakness) caused by cancer of the advanced prostate that had afflicted him since 1969.

The unknown remains how or who introduced the botulinum bacterium, which acts at the neuromuscular level and is also often found in poorly preserved canned foods, into his body.