What Killed Poet Pablo Neruda? New Inquiry Aims to 'Clarify'

Chile is again probing the mystery of what killed Nobel laureate poet Pablo Neruda the day before he was to flee the country amid a 1973 coup. Considered Chile's national poet and greatest intellectual, Neruda had been a close friend of socialist President Salvador Allende, who killed himself rather than surrender to forces led by right-wing general Augusto Pinochet. A member of the Communist Party, Neruda planned to go into exile in Mexico "to lead the resistance against the Pinochet regime," per AFP. But the day before he was to depart, he was taken by ambulance to a Santiago hospital, where he died Sept. 23, 1973, 12 days after the coup. The government claimed Neruda, 69, died of complications from prostate cancer.

But Neruda's driver and personal assistant, Manuel Araya, claimed Pinochet's junta infiltrated the hospital and poisoned Neruda via an injection to the chest—a claim he maintained until his death in June. In 2017, Chilean and international experts said the cancer was not enough to kill Neruda, winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, and mentioned the possibility that "third parties" were involved, per Reuters. Then last year, forensic experts in Canada, Denmark, and Chile detected the presence of clostridium botulinum, a powerful toxin, in Neruda's body. Those findings were delivered to a judge, who closed the investigation in December, per AFP.

An appeals court has now granted a request by Neruda's family and the Communist Party to reopen the probe. The court said Tuesday that the "investigation has not been exhausted" and steps can be taken "to clarify the facts." The court ordered "a new analysis of the handwriting of the death certificate" stating Neruda had died from cancer, testimony from an expert in clostridium botulinum, and a "meta-analysis" of the findings of experts who analyzed Neruda's remains. According to AFP, the experts were "only able to reconstruct a third of the bacterium's genome," but believed they could "recreate the rest of it without exhuming Neruda's body again." (More Pablo Neruda stories.)