Expectation for the report of international experts that must conclude if the poet was poisoned by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet
Just released on Netflix Burning Patiencea film by Chilean director Rodrigo Sepúlveda inspired by a film of the same name that the writer Antonio Skármeta made in 1985 to narrate the friendship between Pablo Neruda and a postman from Isla Negra, where the poet and Nobel Prize winner had built his mythical house overlooking the sea. Another “burning patience” seems to be coming to an end at the same time and after 11 years. It is not a fiction. Chileans are waiting for it to be officially known in the next few hours if the author of Canto General was poisoned by the dictatorship of the general Augusto Pinochet o He died as a consequence of prostate cancer, on September 23, 1973 and one day before leaving for Mexican exile.
A group of specialists in forensic medicine and DNA from Chile, the United States, Canada, Denmark, France and Spain have determined the origin of the bacteria clostridium botulinum that was found in Neruda’s corpse. The conclusion should have been made public last Friday. The forest fires in the south-central zone of the country, which have caused 24 deaths and 800 burned houses, prevented the biochemist Romilo Espejo, one of the experts, from reaching Santiago. Although the announcement was put on hold, the portal The citizen has assured, under the protection of a “well-informed source” and familiar with the two reports already written, that the poet died as a result of a “bioterrorist” inoculation in “a molar” of the Alaska E43 strain of that bacterium. “This crime required significant surgical and microbiological medical knowledge to get hold of the effectiveness with which it materialized,” said The citizen. “I have no doubt that third parties intervened,” said Rodolfo Reyes, Neruda’s nephew. If the journalistic version is confirmed, the case in the hands of the judge in the Paola Plaza case will acquire another significance almost half a century after those events.
Exclusive: Panel of experts determines that Neruda died as a result of “bioterrorist” inoculation of Alaska E43 strain of Clostridiumbotulinum#Neruda #Murder https://t.co/bE6aZ3rbkh
– The Citizen (@El_Ciudadano) February 3, 2023
The long road of the legal case
The story leading up to the moment of this revelation has had twists and turns and a good dose of mystery. It all started in 2011, when Manuel Arayawho had served as Neruda’s driver, revealed that the author of The Captain’s Verses had lost his life as a result of a injection in the abdomen planted by a suspected intelligence agent posing as a doctor. Araya had remained with the poet throughout his hospitalization in a Santiago clinic. One day, not just any day, they asked him to go to the pharmacy. The patient, they explained, needed a medicine that was in short supply at the medical center. But Araya did not go to the pharmacy. They arrested him halfway to take him to the National Stadium, which has been turned into a detention and torture center. And Neruda died.
Upon hearing his testimony, the Chilean Communist Party, of which the poet was one of its figures, immediately filed a complaint in court. Judge Mario Carroza took action on the matter, despite the fact that legal doctor Patricio Bustos had ruled out any conspiracy conjecture. Six years later, and after a legal Medical Service search warrant, investigators found the malignant bacteria in a sample of teeth and bones. On that occasion it was concluded that an accelerated metastasis could not be accepted as the cause of the poet’s death. Carroza left his post in 2019, perhaps tired of the lack of support from the right-wing government of Sebastián Piñera. Immediately the pandemic took place. We had to wait five labyrinthine years to find out if Clostridium botulinum is of endogenous or exogenous origin.
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The “burning patience” with which the experts’ conclusions are awaited was accompanied by a book that made some noise, crime neruda, by the Italian writer Roberto Ippolito, who took care in 2020 to gather all the clues that led him to refute the version of a “natural” and “sudden” death of the poet. Araya’s story is crucial here. Ippolito in turn recalls that, although Neruda suffered from prostate cancer, his situation, at 71, was not terminal. Matilde Urrutia, his wife at the time, received a death certificate signed by a doctor unrelated to the case. She never received her husband’s medical records. In those pages, reference is made to another mysterious doctor who did not belong to the institution and was in charge of the patient just before he died. Araya himself, accompanied by Francisco and Mario Casasús, also published The double murder of Neruda.
A disputed figure
Beyond the judicial circumstances, the figure of Neruda has been the object of critical scrutiny in recent years, especially after a film by Chilean Pablo Laraín and the rejection by feminist groups of having the Santiago international airport bear his name. . The man who shook generations with his verses and who was considered a committed intellectual model He has also been a woman abuser who abandoned his sick daughter and boasted in his memoir, I confess that I have livedof having raped a domestic servant while serving as consul in present-day Sri Lanka, in 1929.”What do we do with Neruda? Do we evaluate it with today’s eyes? With this present that tells us about gender perspectives, equality, feminism? Shall we cancel it? Shall we stop reading it? Shall we not name it more? Shall we hide it under the leaves of a Parral cemetery? I don’t think so, but memory does seem important to me and from that place, that of information, evaluate whether or not we want to continue reading Lewis Carroll, Dickens, Flaubert”, asked the writer Montserrat Martorell.