For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. He died there on the evening of 23 September, purportedly from the wasting effects of the prostate cancer that had first been detected four years earlier. Pinochet’s US-backed coup, during which Allende killed himself as troops stormed the presidential palace, devastated Neruda and led him to plan an exile in Mexico.īut a day before his planned departure, he was taken by ambulance to the hospital in the Chilean capital where he had been treated for cancer and other conditions. “Who fired it? We’ll find out soon, but there’s no doubt Neruda was killed through the direct intervention of a third party.” “We’ve found the bullet that killed Neruda, and it was in his body,” Reyes told Efe. Reyes said analysis by experts at McMaster University in Canada and the University of Copenhagen had established the bacteria did not find their way into Neruda’s body from the coffin or the surrounding area. The bacteria, which produce the neurotoxin that causes botulism, were discovered on one of Neruda’s exhumed teeth in 2017. “What does that mean? It means Neruda was murdered through the intervention of state agents in 1973.”
“We now know that there was no reason for the clostridium botulinum to have been there in his bones,” Reyes told the Spanish news agency Efe. The results of expert analysis are due to be published in a report on Wednesday. On Monday, Reyes said scientific tests had shown the toxin clostridium botulinum was present in his uncle’s body when he died, suggesting he was indeed “poisoned” in the aftermath of the coup. Two years later, a team of international scientists said they were “100% convinced” the poet did not die from prostate cancer. Samples of Neruda’s remains were dispatched to forensic laboratories in four countries for analysis, and in 2015 the Chilean government said it was “highly probable that a third party” was responsible for his death. Ten years ago, a Chilean judge ordered the exhumation of the poet’s remains after his former chauffeur, Manuel Araya, revealed that an agitated Neruda had called him from the Santiago hospital where he was being treated to say that he had been injected in the stomach while asleep. But some, including Neruda’s nephew, Rodolfo Reyes, have long believed he was murdered because of his opposition to the then incipient dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
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