Time.news – He Chilean poet Pablo Neruda ‘died of poisoning’. The Paìs writes on the basis of what was announced by the poet’s nephew, Rodolfo Reyes, who assures – writes the Spanish daily – that the international group of experts who analyzed the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, found in his body in 2017, “has established that its origin was endogenous”. The conclusion of the expert report, therefore, would confirm the thesis of the original complaint according to which the substance “was injected as a biological weapon”, which caused its poisoning.
“I can say that because I know the reports. I say this, as a lawyer and nephew, with great responsibility, because the judge cannot yet report it because he must have all the information,” said Reyes in a conversation with the Madrid newspaper. The official results should still be made public this Wednesday.
The Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded the title in 1971, died on September 23, 1973 in the San María clinic in Santiago, twelve days after the coup d’état that ousted President Salvador Allende. “For 40 years – followed by the Paìs – it was believed that the official cause of his death was prostate cancer, until his former driver, Manuel Araya, pointed out that he had been poisoned, testimony which is then the basis of the complaint presented by the Communist Party.
According to the newspaper this is the third procedure carried out to establish the causes of Neruda’s deathwrites the newspaper, and the group of specialists who carried out the analyzes on the poet’s body is made up of technicians from Canada, Mexico, El Salvador, Denmark, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Canada and Chile.
Two laboratories, one in Canada and the other in Denmark, then carried out the tests. The Neruda case has been investigated for more than 10 years and in the year in which the poet died the case had emerged under the old rules of Chilean justice, in force until 2005, which had classified the files together with those concerning hundreds of other cases of violation of human rights that occurred under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.