Pablo Neruda’s nephew claims that tests prove that the poet was poisoned

Forensic experts have concluded that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) died of poisoning nearly 50 years ago, a family member of the Nobel Prize winner said earlier this week, as reported by Agência Estado. The revelation of Rodolfo Reyes, Neruda’s nephew, is the latest turning point in one of the great debates in post-coup Chile. The long-stated official position is that Neruda died of complications from prostate cancer, but the poet’s chauffeur has argued for decades that he was poisoned.

There was no confirmation of Reyes’ comments by forensic experts in Canada, Denmark and Chile, who are expected to publicly release a report on Wednesday into Neruda’s cause of death.

The public release of the group’s finding has been delayed twice this year, first because of Internet connectivity problems for one of the experts and then again because a judge said the panel had not yet reached a consensus.

Several years ago, international forensic experts rejected the official cause of death as cachexia, or weakness and wasting of the body due to a chronic illness – in this case, cancer. But at that time they said they hadn’t determined what killed Neruda.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Reyes said that forensic tests carried out in Danish and Canadian laboratories indicated the presence of “a large amount of Clostridium botulinum, which is incompatible with human life.” The powerful toxin can cause nervous system paralysis and death.

Reyes first revealed the information to Spanish news agency EFE on Monday.

As a lawyer in the court case for his uncle’s death, Reyes said he has access to the forensic report, which was carried out after the same group of experts said in 2017 that there was evidence of a toxin in the late poet’s bones and in a molar.

Laboratory tests concluded that the toxin was administered while the poet was alive, Reyes said.

The report is due to be released almost 50 years after the death of the poet and Communist Party member and 12 years after the start of a judicial investigation into whether he was poisoned, as his driver Manuel Araya claims.

Araya told the AP earlier this month that he was confident the forensic findings would support his claim that the poet died after receiving “an injection in the stomach” at the clinic where he was hospitalized. Araya said he first heard this version of events from a nurse.

Neruda, who was 69 and suffering from prostate cancer, died in the chaos that followed the September 11, 1973 coup in Chile that overthrew President Salvador Allende and brought General Augusto Pinochet to power.

Neruda’s body was exhumed in 2013 to determine the cause of his death, but those tests showed no toxic agents or poisons in his bones. His family and driver demanded further investigation.

In 2015, Chile’s government said it was “highly likely that a third party” was responsible for Neruda’s death. The poet was reburied in his favorite home overlooking the Pacific coast last year.

In 2017, a team of international scientists determined that Neruda did not die of cancer or malnutrition, rejecting the official cause of death but not saying what he died of.

“The fundamental conclusions are the invalidity of the death certificate when it comes to cachexia as the cause of death,” said Aurelio Luna, one of the experts on the panel at the time. “We still cannot exclude or affirm the natural or violent cause of Pablo Neruda’s death.”

Neruda, best known for his love poems, was a friend of Allende, who preferred to kill himself rather than surrender to the troops during the coup led by Pinochet.

But the day before his planned departure, he was taken by ambulance to a clinic in Chile’s capital, Santiago, where he had been treated for cancer and other illnesses. Neruda officially died there on September 23, 1973, of natural causes.

But suspicions that the dictatorship had a hand in the death lingered long after Chile returned to democracy in 1990.

Former Mexican ambassador to Chile at the time of the military coup, Gonzalo Martínez Corbalá, told the AP on two occasions that he saw Neruda the day before his death and that his body weight was close to 100 kilograms. Martínez spoke to the news agency by phone in 2017, just days before his death.

Araya told the AP last month that he still thinks that if Neruda “hadn’t been left alone in the clinic, they wouldn’t have killed him.”