In a report released last Wednesday, two experts claim not to have been able to determine whether the Nobel Prize for Literature, a fervent opponent of Pinochet, had died poisoned or not.
Two members of the panel of experts who investigated the sudden death of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in 1973, told AFP on Thursday February 16 that they could not determine whether or not the death of the Nobel Prize for Literature was due to a poisoning.
The bacterium Clostridium botulinum “was present at the time of his death but we still do not know why. We just know she shouldn’t be there“, explained Hendrik and Debi Poinar, of the Canadian university McMaster. They thus confirmed to AFP their conclusions published in an article of their university.
The panel of experts analyzed the results of samples taken from the remains of the poet, whose body was exhumed in April 2013 from the crypt where he had been resting since 1992, in Isla Negra, 120 km west of the Chilean capital. .
Chilean justice investigates
Their report was submitted on Wednesday February 15 to Paola Plaza, the Chilean judge in charge of the case. The same day, the latter declared at a press conference that the document would be studied so that the court could decide, without specifying the duration of this evaluation stage.
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Hendrik and Debi Poinar worked at the request of Chilean justice for four years. The poisoning theory has been mooted for more than a decade in Chile. The two researchers said they were able to recover Pablo Neruda’s DNA from one of his molars, but, due to its degradation, only managed to reconstruct a third of the bacteria’s genome. Clostridium botulinum.
According to them, it is however possible to reconstruct it in its entirety without new exhumation. “There is enough material to do it with what we have in the laboratory. We just need to have the approval of the court”they assured AFP.
The poisoning theory remains unresolved
Pablo Neruda died on September 23, 1973, twelve days after General Augusto Pinochet’s coup against Socialist President Salvador Allende, a great friend of the poet. International experts had unanimously rejected in 2017 the official version of the military regime, according to which he would have died of a sudden aggravation of his cancer.
But they could not confirm or exclude the possibility of voluntary contamination by injecting germs or bacterial toxins. According to this theory of poisoning, Pablo Neruda would have succumbed to an injection made the day before his departure for Mexico, where he planned to go into exile to lead the opposition to the Pinochet regime (1973-1990).