The Court of Appeals of Santiago ordered the reopening of the case file “in order to properly carry out the procedures” requested by the plaintiffs, which “could shed light on the facts”, according to its decision.
The resumption of the investigation had been requested by the poet’s relatives, including one of his nephews, as well as the Communist Party, of which Neruda was a member.
The Court of Appeal decision annuls the order given by Judge Paola Plasa to close the investigation into the causes of death of the poet, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
Pablo Neruda died on September 23, 1973, twelve days after the coup of General Pinochet and the overthrow of the Socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, a close friend of the poet. The case of his murder emerged in 2011, after the revelations made by Manuel Araya, who at the time was a young member of the Communist Party and worked as the author’s assistant and guide. According to this theory, Neruda died after receiving an injection on the eve of his departure for Mexico, where he intended to exile himself to organize resistance to the Pinochet regime.
Until then, the official version said that the poet died of prostate cancer. In 2017, international experts unanimously rejected the official version of the dictatorial regime. But they neither confirmed nor ruled out the possibility that he was intentionally poisoned with some toxin or bacteria when he was given the “suspected” injection.
Among the new measures ordered by the court today is an “expertise to review and interpret the results” that experts came to when they analyzed samples from the poet’s body after he was exhumed. A group of local and foreign experts had undertaken to reach a definitive conclusion in 2023. They thus analyzed the results of the analyzes carried out after Neruda was exhumed, in April 2013, from the crypt where he had been resting since 1992, in Isla Negra, 120 kilometers west of Santiago.
Their conclusions were submitted to Judge Paola Plasa. Two members of the committee, from Canada’s McMaster University, Hendrick and Debbie Poinard, assured that they could not conclude whether Neruda’s death was due to poisoning or not. The two researchers explained that they obtained Neruda’s DNA from a tooth but, due to the decomposition of the body, they were only able to reconstruct a third of the botulinum bacterium (clostridium botulinum). Speaking to AFP, however, they said that it was possible to carry out the reconstruction, without a new excavation. “There is enough material with what we have in the lab. We just need the consent of the court,” they said.
The Court of Appeals also requested a “new analysis of the death certificate signed by Dr. Vargas Salazar, which states that Neruda died of prostate cancer metastasis. New witnesses and an expert on the clostridium botulinum bacterium are also called to testify.
According to official figures, around 3,200 people were murdered during the Pinochet dictatorship and another 38,000 were tortured.
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