The former driver of Pablo Neruda, whose testimony was crucial to the thesis of the assassination of the Nobel Prize winner in literature in 1973, has died in Chile at the age of 77, the Chilean Communist Party said on Wednesday.
“Manuel Araya’s testimony, his management and his courage were crucial to the existence of the elements that gave rise to the lawsuit that the party, with his family, presented over the poet’s death,” reads a press release from the Communist Party. It said the former driver died Tuesday in the city of San Antonio, west of Santiago.
The hypothesis of an assassination of the 1971 Nobel Prize winner in 1973 surfaced in 2011 following the revelations of Manuel Araya, a then-young activist whom the Chilean Communist Party had appointed as the writer’s assistant and driver, himself a member of the left.
Until then, the official version was that the poet died of prostate cancer on September 23, 1973.
According to this scientifically unexplained theory, Pablo Neruda would have succumbed to a mysterious injection given to him the day before he left for Mexico, where he intended to go into exile to lead the opposition to the Pinochet regime (1973-1990). .
“Neruda was a threat to Pinochet […] “Pinochet was not interested in (Neruda) leaving the country for any reason,” Manuel Araya declared last February to insist on the version of the assassination.
Despite having supported the assassination thesis for almost forty years, it was not until June 2011 that the PC called for a judicial inquiry that allowed for the exhumation and toxicological analyses.
However, the panel of experts investigating the poet’s mysterious death could not determine whether or not his death was due to poisoning.
The bacterium Clostridium botulinum “was present at the time of his death, but we still don’t know why. We just know it shouldn’t be there,” said Hendrik and Debi Poinar of Canada’s McMaster University, both members of the panel submitted its findings to the Chilean judge in charge of the case in February.