Chile will try again to solve the mystery surrounding the 1973 death of poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, who may have been poisoned under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, an appeals court ruling said on Tuesday.
• Also read: Chile: Death of Neruda's former driver who supported the murder theory
“The reopening of the investigation is ordered in order to carry out the procedures requested by the complainants,” which “could contribute to clarifying the facts,” the Santiago Court of Appeal said in its ruling.
The reopening of the investigation was requested by the poet's relatives, including a nephew, as well as by the Communist Party, to which the 1971 Nobel Prize winner for literature belonged.
The appeal court's ruling thus annuls the order to close the investigation into the causes of his death issued in December by the judge in charge of the case, Paola Plaza.
Pablo Neruda died on September 23, 1973, twelve days after General Pinochet's coup against the socialist president Salvador Allende, a great friend of the poet.
The hypothesis of an assassination attempt emerged in 2011 following the revelations of Manuel Araya, who died in June 2023, a then young activist whom the Chilean Communist Party had appointed as the writer's assistant and driver.
According to this poisoning theory, Pablo Neruda died from an injection given to him the day before he left for Mexico, where he planned to go into exile to lead the opposition to the Pinochet regime (1973-1990).
Until then, the official version was that the poet died of prostate cancer.
In 2017, international experts unanimously rejected the official version of the military regime. However, they could not confirm or rule out the possibility of voluntary and intentional contamination through the injection of germs or bacterial toxins.
“Mega competence”
Among the new measures ordered by the courts on Tuesday is a “meta-expertise to review and interpret the findings of the experts” who analyzed the remains of the poet's exhumed body.
A panel of national and international experts was appointed to finally complete the investigation in 2023. They had analyzed the results of a series of samples from the remains of the poet, whose body was exhumed in April 2013 from the crypt where he had rested since 1992 on Isla Negra, 120 kilometers west of the capital.
Their conclusions were presented to Judge Paola Plaza in February 2023. Two members of the panel from Canada's McMaster University, Hendrik and Debi Poinar, assured that they could not determine whether Neruda's death was due to poisoning or not.
The two researchers said they were able to recover Pablo Neruda's DNA from one of his molars, but due to degradation they only managed to reconstruct a third of the genome of the bacterium Clostridium botulinum.
However, they assured that a complete reconstruction was possible without further exhumation. “With what we have in the lab, there is enough material for it. We just need the approval of the court,” they assured AFP.
Other measures ordered by the Santiago Court of Appeal include “a new analysis of the handwriting of the death certificate allegedly issued by Doctor Vargas Salazar,” which shows that Neruda died of metastases caused by the prostate cancer from which he suffered.
In addition, new witnesses and an expert will be called to investigate the bacterium “Costridium botulinum,” which is said to have been inoculated into Neruda.
According to official figures, Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship caused around 3,200 deaths and over 38,000 people were tortured.