Pablo Neruda would have been assassinated by order of Pinochet. This is the conclusion reached by a group of international experts who this Friday planned to present a judicial report with the results of their investigations at a press conference in Santiago, Chile, which was suspended at the last minute.
However, a few hours earlier, the Chilean newspaper El Ciudadano had published a leak from a source close to the legal case that would confirm that this report would ratify the poet’s poisoning with botulinum toxin.
The aforementioned portal indicated that the report confirms what was already known since 2017: that the cause of death of the Nobel Prize for Literature was “the Alaskae43 strain of clostridium botulinum”, whose DNA was found in “the pulp of a molar”. From the writer.
Thus, the aforementioned experts would ratify the poisoning but this Friday, in addition, they also had to clarify how the botulinum toxin was introduced into the writer’s body.
The suspension of today’s press conference, which was to be held at the Palace of Courts in Santiago, where it was going to be made public how the bacillus got to Neruda’s tooth, was motivated by the impossibility of several of them appearing , which since January 24 have been meeting online and in person to draw up their conclusions.
Until now, the main hypothesis is that the poisoning would have occurred through an unscheduled injection in the abdomen by a supposed doctor, who in reality would be a secret agent of the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
Said injection was revealed in 2011 by the poet’s driver, Manuel Araya, which led to the opening of a judicial investigation after a complaint by the Chilean Communist Party, of which Neruda was a member.
The false doctor, a certain Doctor Prize, who does not appear in any record, would have punctured the writer at approximately four in the afternoon on September 23, 1973, at the Santa MarÃa de Santiago clinic, where he had been transferred from his home. of Isla Negra as a consequence of the cancer he suffered. Neruda died at half past ten at night that same day.
It had been two weeks since Pinochet’s coup d’état that had put an end to the government of the socialist Salvador Allende -a friend of the writer- and, although Neruda suffered from cancer, all the people and doctors close to him who treated him those days agree that his condition was not it was terminal. In fact, he had already decided to go into exile in Mexico, with the supposed approval of the military regime, after the government of that country granted him asylum.
It is speculated that Pinochet ordered the assassination of Neruda so that he could not become a symbol against the dictatorship abroad.
This group of scientists is the third to try to clarify the death of the poet within the framework of the judicial process and is made up, among others, of experts from the DNA Center of the MacMaster University of Canada and the Department of Forensic Medicine of the University of Copenhagen.
A second group of experts was the one who discovered botulinum toxin in the poet’s body in 2017, after his remains were exhumed from his tomb in Isla Negra in 2013.
That same year, a first forensic team had ruled, in the first instance, that Neruda had died of natural causes, as a result of the prostate cancer he suffered from.
