An appeals court in Chile has ordered a new investigation into the death of the renowned poet Pablo Neruda in 1973, shortly after the military coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power. The court stated that the previous inquiry into Neruda’s death was not thorough and that further steps were needed to “clarify the facts,” in response to a request from Neruda’s family and Chile’s Communist Party.
Last year, an international panel of experts submitted a report on Neruda’s death to the Court of Appeals of Santiago. The panel provided documents that included laboratory reports from Canada and Denmark as well as reports from reviewing experts. The specific details of their findings were not disclosed.
The appeals court has now ordered handwriting tests, analyses of tests conducted by experts from the universities of McMaster and Copenhagen, and a review of the file and expert statements as part of the reopened investigation.
In 2017, a group of foreign forensic experts suggested that Neruda may not have died solely of cancer, as officially stated, and did not dismiss the possibility of “third parties” being involved in his death in the early days of Pinochet’s dictatorship.
When he passed away on Sept. 23, 1973, Neruda was a member of the Chilean Communist Party’s Central Committee and was considered Chile’s national poet and most important intellectual. He had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971, two years before the overthrow of socialist President Salvador Allende, whom Neruda was close to.
Neruda’s driver, Manuel Araya, has alleged that Neruda was given a lethal injection by agents of Pinochet’s junta who had infiltrated the Santa Maria Clinic where he was receiving treatment. The appeals court did not address Araya’s accusation in its statement.
(Report by Fabián Andrés Cambero; editing by Mark Heinrich)
