Was Neruda another Pinochet victim?

Pablo Neruda

In her Corriere della Sera blog Italian journalist Alessandra Muglia talks of the Chilean communist government's intention to exhume the remains of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda to determine if the great poet had been murdered by the Pinochet regime. The green light's been given for a judicial inquiry into the matter of a possible Neruda assassination(translated passages to follow mine):

After the exhumation of Salvador Allende's body in July, Chile finds itself in the midst of another national controversy. "What exactly was injected into the veins of Pablo Neruda, a pain killer for a suffering cancer patient or a lethal injection?" And to answer this question the Chilean Communinist party has requested judicial permission for the exhumation of the Nobel laureate, buried with his wife Matilde Urrutia at Isla Negra, about 100 km west of the capital almost 40 years ago."

The Neruda affair reads like a murder mystery with first-hand testimonies, legal inquiries, conjectures and even a square-off between Neruda's own personal driver and the skeptical president of the Neruda Foundation, Juan Agustin Figuero, who's staunchly opposed to any assassination theory or exhumation plan. Accepting the official version of Neruda's death by prostate cancer, Figuero considers any exhumation plans "a profanation".

What took place on that 23rd September 1973 in Santiago's Santa Maria clinic, 12 days after the Pinochet coup? Manuel Carroza, chief magistrate, has authorized a full judicial investigation.

But the idea of disturbing the remains of the great poet doesn't sit well with many, including Juan Agustin Figuero, president of the Neruda Foundation who refers to the exhumation plan as an "act of profanation".

According to the testimony of Neruda's personal driver, it was the Nobel laureate who told him of an "injection" he'd just been quickly given. And it could very well have been the injection that killed him. In an exclusive Clarin interview the driver recounts how he received a phone call from Neruda telling him of a suspicious injection received while he was receiving treatment. "I was with his wife Matilda," he said, "with her we rushed to the hospital where we found him red, swollen and shaking with fever. A doctor told me to go to the city immediately to a pharmacy, it was a question of life or death". But he was taken by police on the way there and placed in a detention centre used for torture by the dictatorship."

Araya has accused the Neruda Foundation of lying about the poet's death: for him there's no doubt, the Nobel laureate was killed by the Pinochet regime.

The Communist party attorney, Eduardo Contreras, gives corroborating evidence:

Party attorney Eduardo Contreras explains that there's no mention of cancer in the official death certificate but rather of "cachexia, a general wasting away of the body produced after months of illness." He cites the certified declarations of former Mexican ambassador to Chile, Gonzalo Martinez, who was present with the author of the Twenty Poems of Love before his death, as well as others. "Here's proof that in his final hours of life the great poet spoke and walked about freely: not at all in the immobilized state described in the official reports. The papers of the day reported that Neruda succumbed to heart failure caused by shock. We maintain the shock was induced by an injection administered to him, in the stomach, on 23 September."

Given his loyalty to communism and friend Salvador Allende, who oftentimes sought Neruda's advice on political matters, and the near certainty that life as an exiled poet in Mexico, where he was bound days before his death, would have meant a future barrage of anti-Pinochet invective from one of the world's most revered & endearing literary figures, the murder seems all too likely to have occurred. All that remains are the toxicological reports on the poet's remains. And if the results show death by lethal injection, this will go down probably as literary history's most heinous murder.

A warm thank you to Ms. Muglia for a fine article and some interesting historiography.