Santiago de Chile, Oct. 11 (EFE). – The Communist Party of Chile (PC) has called this Wednesday to reopen the summary of the death of the poet and Nobel Prize winner in literature Pablo Neruda, which occurred 12 days after the coup d’état of Augusto Pinochet, who led the government of the former Socialist President Salvador Allende (1970-1973) fell.
The judge in charge of the investigation, Paola Plaza, who must clarify whether the writer died of the advanced prostate cancer he was suffering from or whether he was poisoned by a secret agent of the dictatorship, concluded the investigation on September 25th, according to Exceptional cases before After 15 days, one of the parties requests further proceedings. The PC did that today.
“We have a political, moral, ethical and legal obligation to do what an institution should do when issues of historical importance are ultimately left to interpretation,” party President Lautaro Carmona said in a news conference.
“It is also a commitment to truth, justice and democracy,” he added.
Neruda died on September 23, 1973 in the Santa María clinic in Santiago, one day before he went into exile in Mexico, where he could have become the dictator’s great opponent.
“He was the ideal candidate to lead a government in exile. From the first days after the coup, the dictatorship wanted to prevent this,” reads a PC transcript released today.
On this point, the text says, “a lot of documentation has been revealed,” which is why the party is asking to call Peter Kornbluh, a Chile analyst from the US National Security Archive, as a witness.
The poisoning theory was first raised publicly by the poet’s driver and secretary, Manuel Araya, who died last June at the age of 77. His statement was the basis of the complaint filed by the Communist Party – supported by part of the writer’s family – which gave rise to the ongoing investigation in 2011.
Among other evidence, the PC also requested the identification of those allegedly involved in the crime: “We have provided new records on who could be directly related to the administration of the injection,” said lawyer Miguel Luna, a member of the party’s legal team , today .
The human rights officer of the communists, María Angélica Puelma, emphasized that “the moral obligation” of their training is because, as she said, “impunity is very damaging to democracy.”
Three international bodies were involved in the investigation, which lasted six years. The second of these contradicted the previously official version, which attributed the diplomat’s death to his illness and revealed the presence of the bacillus responsible for botulism “Clostridium botulinum” in one of his molars after the exhumation of his remains in 2013.
The third group of experts, which submitted its final report to Judge Plaza last February, had to determine whether this bacterium, which is normally found in the soil and can cause problems in the nervous system and even death, was in the Neruda’s body at the time of death or whether it penetrated in some way afterwards.
Days before the submission of the forensic conclusions, the poet’s nephew, Rodolfo Reyes, who had access to the report as plaintiff in the case, stated that the experts had concluded that the “Clostridium botulinum” found in the writer’s remains in 2017 “was in his body at the time of death.”
For the family, this is irrefutable evidence that Neruda was poisoned during his hospital stay. EFE
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