The Pablo Neruda case, which aims to determine the cause of the death of the Chilean poet in September 1973, is coming to an end after more than 10 years of investigations in his country’s courts. Since January 25, an international team of experts has been meeting to determine whether the origin of the bacterium Clostridium botulinum found in the body in 2017 is toxic or not. The conclusions, to be announced next Friday, February 3, will be the key to clarifying whether there was any third-party intervention in the death of the Nobel Prize in Literature a few days after September 11, 1973.
“The complexity of the Neruda case, as well as the generality of the cases we have in court, is the elapsed time. His death was on September 23, 1973 and we are already turning 50 while the investigation began 40 years later. There is also related scientific research in this case,” says Judge Paola Plaza, who will have the mission to close a historic case that has sparked interest both inside and outside Chile. She will do so on a scientific basis after hearing the conclusions of the panel of experts do.
The Chilean poet died on September 23, 1973, 12 days after the military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist government. He had metastatic prostate cancer. But in 2011, the Communist Party (PC), in which the writer was active, filed a complaint challenging this hypothesis after Manuel Araya, his driver, denounced that he had been poisoned with chemicals by the military regime while he was admitted to Santa Claus Clinic Maria in Santiago.
Judge Plaza received the Neruda case in 2020 when the judge who investigated it for nine years, Mario Carroza, was promoted to the Supreme Court. It was the same judge who in 2013 ordered the exhumation of the writer’s body in Isla Negra, a coastal town 100 kilometers from Santiago.
Minister Plaza González examines the files of Neruda’s death in Santiago (Chile). Cristian Soto Quiroz
For the third time, an international panel of experts is supporting this cause and this time it is made up of experts from Canada, Mexico, El Salvador, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark and the United States. Also involved are the Chilean Ministry of the Interior, which funded the report, the Forensic Medical Service and the plaintiffs from the PC. Two lawyers, Rodolfo Reyes, the poet’s nephew, and Elizabeth Flores, are handling the case.
During those years, the Neruda case had three panels and several episodes. In 2017, for example, the first discovery of a bacterium, Staphylocus aureus, was made. It was the second group of experts that cleared the doubts as they found that the origin was exogenous. But he also made another discovery: the presence of Clostridium botulinum. “When a proteomic and genomic analysis of different bacteria was performed, this finding emerged. For this reason, this third panel was created, which focuses on examining the DNA of the substance found, because there were open questions in the genomics,” explains Judge Plaza.
“It’s not normal for a person to have this substance, but it can be from many things and it can be multicausal. One of these explanations is the submitted complaint’s thesis that the substance was vaccinated to cause death. The genomics committee has to clarify that,” adds the magistrate.
A matter of old justice
The court where Plaza works, the judge investigating the circumstances of Neruda’s death in 1973, is the last bastion of the ancient Chilean judiciary, reformed in 2005, replacing the curious and secretive system with an oral one, where investigations take place today the hands of prosecutors. But it still only applies to the hundreds of cases opened for human rights violations during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
“This is a court of pencil, paper, thread and needle,” says the judge in her office in downtown Santiago. He points out that there are several folders on his desk, hand-sewn by actuaries the old-fashioned way, and they still fold the sheets one at a time, arranging them with numbers and letters. Everything seems light years away from the digitization of the judiciary.
Plaza has been Minister of the Santiago Court of Appeal since 2018. And she is part of the new generation of judges charged with investigating crimes following the coup, which marks the 50th anniversary of September 11, 2023. In fact, once a month former security officials accused of kidnapping, murder and torture who are in their 70s or 80s meet again at their courthouse to sign a book stating that they have the precautionary measure of release maintain bail while their cases are pending.
Between 2018 and 2023, Plaza has handled 125 cases and has already convicted former uniformed soldiers at first instance in several cases, most of whom belonged to the dictatorship’s security services, the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) and the National Information Center (CNI). Among the 86 under investigation is the case of Neruda’s death, which has just entered its crucial phase. But this legal decision will be different from the ones he has made in other cases.
From Laws to Science
Before becoming an investigator, the judge gained experience as a reporter for the Santiago Court of Appeals and the Criminal Division of the Supreme Court. In this capacity, he studied hundreds of files on closed cases, most of the human rights violations committed during the 17 years of military rule between 1973 and 1990.
All these experiences later helped him to reconstruct crimes committed 40 or 50 years ago. These are cases where not only will memory be tested, but you will need to gather evidence, contrast testimonies and delve into already closed case files that contain important information. “It’s very complex. In general, one tends to mistakenly believe that information is being hidden, but this is not always the case. I put myself to the test. I’m 54 years old and I’ve been trying to recall episodes from 30 years ago and it’s complicated,” Plaza says.
But the Neruda case was completely different from the others. It is the only one that the judge had to study other disciplines to investigate and soon solve. For example scientific books and papers on genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, NGS technology and especially Clostridium botulinum analysis. He was also constantly advised by a biochemist from the investigative police (PDI) and a forensic odontologist from the Legal Medical Service (SML).
Paola Plaza González, former correspondent of the Santiago Court of Appeal and the Criminal Division of the Supreme Court Cristian Soto Quiroz
A chain of poisoning
In Chilean judicial history, poisonings of opponents of the regime were investigated after the coup, but only after Neruda’s death. In 1976, former Santiago real estate curator Renato León Zenteno was murdered by being poisoned with sarin gas, a case that Judge Plaza was also investigating and in which four DINA agents were prosecuted. A year later, in 1977, the murder of Manuel Leyton Robles, a former DINA officer, was committed using the same method.
In 1982, the former Chilean President from 1964 to 1970, the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva, died in the Santa María Clinic. Although Judge Alejandro Madrid ruled in 2019 that he had died from a chemical substance, in 2021 a unanimous ruling by the Santiago Court of Appeal, of which Minister Plaza was a member, refuted that thesis. The court held that there was no murder involved, but that the death was “due to medical complications”. The case is before the Supreme Court for review.
The fourth event dates back to 1981, eight years after Neruda’s death, and for which there are legal advances. This comes after Santiago’s Court of Appeal upheld in February 2021 the convictions of five former uniformed officers for the murder of two prisoners and the frustrated murder of another five, accused of poisoning them with botulinum toxin while incarcerated in the old prison public prison.
Judge Plaza will be the one who will make the final decision on whether or not Neruda’s death is part of this chain, assuming as always if he died of natural causes from cancer.
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