Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet, politician and Nobel Prize winner for literature, died on September 23, 1973. His death certificate stated that the cause was prostate cancer, but over the past fifty years some of his relatives and acquaintances have claimed that Neruda had actually been killed because of his opposition to the regime of Augusto Pinochet, who had seized power in Chile in a coup d’état a few days before his death. The results of a new study were published on Wednesday which confirm the possibility that this is indeed the case, without representing definitive confirmation.
In 2013, Neruda’s former chauffeur Manuel Araya told a Mexican newspaper that a few hours before his death, Neruda had called him from the hospital in Santiago de Chile where he was being treated, saying he had undergone an injection in his stomach while he was sleeping. After these statements, a judge had ordered the exhumation of Neruda’s remains which have since been examined by forensic medicine centers in several countries. In 2015 the Chilean government had declared that the responsibility for Neruda’s death was “very likely” to a third party, and in 2017 a group of scientists had already expressed itself in favor of the murder hypothesis, excluding that the poet was dead due to her cancer.
The latest study of Neruda’s corpse was made by a team of researchers from McMaster University, Canada, and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and was presented in a Chilean court on Wednesday. The study focuses on Clostridium botulinum, the microorganism responsible for botulism and used several times in the world as a biological weapon, which was found in Neruda’s teeth in 2017. It was confirmed that the bacterium was present in the poet’s remains and that there was present at the time of his death, while the hypothesis that it had arrived from the coffin has been excluded: in the soil around Neruda’s tomb a concentration and type of strains of C. botulinum compatible with those present in the remains have not been found. It has also been excluded that the bacterium had arrived in the poet’s body from the surrounding environment after his death, because the bacterium’s DNA was degraded in a similar way to that of the bacteria in Neruda’s mouth.
It is therefore possible that C. botulinum was the cause of the poet’s death, although further investigations are needed to establish or exclude it, as well as to say how the bacterium entered his body.
On September 11, 1973, 12 days before Neruda died, a military coup ousted then-President Salvador Allende – who had been democratically elected in 1970 – and brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. Allende had killed himself in the attack on the presidential palace and Neruda, who was very close to him, had begun planning to flee to Mexico. A day before the scheduled departure, however, he had been rushed to the hospital where he had previously been treated for prostate cancer discovered four years earlier, and died within a short time.
The death immediately raised some doubts. For example, Mexican ambassador to Chile Gonzalo Martínez Corbalá, who had seen Neruda two days before his death, said he was overweight, a rare thing for a terminal cancer patient. Initially the investigation into his death focused on a doctor, a certain “Dr. Price”, who was listed as the one on duty at the hospital on the night Neruda was allegedly poisoned. Price, however, was never found and was probably just a name invented to throw off the investigation.
To confirm the hypothesis of poisoning, one could compare the DNA of C. botulinum found in Neruda’s remains with that of the strains of the bacteria used in 1981 to poison some Chilean political prisoners.
Now the Chilean court to which the results of the study have been submitted will have to decide whether to continue the investigation into Neruda’s death with further studies.
