Claims have persisted that the communist poet was murdered in 1973 by agents of Chilean dictator Pinochet. Now a Spanish team examining exhumed bones has found troubling results

The discovery this week of “unusual” bacteria in the bones of Pablo Neruda has reopened the possibility that one of the 20th century’s greatest poets was poisoned in a Chilean hospital.

The announcement was made by a forensic team in Spain four months after a Chilean judge declared that the investigation had run its course and the body should be reburied.

Neruda, who won the 1971 Nobel prize for literature, died on 23 September 1973, just 12 days after General Augusto Pinochet seized power in a military coup. Neruda’s chauffeur, Manuel Araya, told the Mexican magazine Proceso in 2011 that the poet, a longtime member of Chile’s communist party, had been murdered by an injection to his stomach by political enemies as he lay in his hospital bed in the country’s capital, Santiago.



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Mario Carroza, the judge in charge of the case, ordered the exhumation of Neruda’s body from his grave at his house at Isla Negra, on Chile’s Pacific coast, on 8 April 2013. His bones were examined in Chile, North Carolina in the United States, Murcia in southern Spain and, more recently, Switzerland. In November 2013, forensic experts announced that they had found no evidence of poisoning, although the investigation was not formally ended.

The Chilean government reopened the case in January this year, ordering new tests designed to look for protein damage caused by chemical agents, and a month later – in the absence of any signs of poisoning – Carroza ordered that Neruda’s body should be returned to his grave in front of his beloved coastal home.

However, the forensic team in Murcia has announced it has found three types of protein. Two of these could be explained by Neruda’s advanced prostate cancer, but the source of the third protein, staphylococcus bacteria, was unclear. Dr Aurelio Luna, a member of the Murcia team, said: “We have to be cautious when examining the data. At the moment, all possibilities are open. I very much doubt that this was due to an infection incurred during hospital treatment. It was either a provoked infection or it was the result of an endogenous process which the poet was carrying inside him and which was accelerated by the decreased defence mechanism caused by the tumour process.”

Dr Luna added that further forensic tests would show whether the bacteria were of the kind that most individuals carry as pathogens or whether the bacteria had been “modified to increase their virulence”. Asked whether Neruda could have received an injection by a “third party”, Dr Luna replied: “It’s one option, but to reach a definitive conclusion, we must first determine the genetic characteristics of the bacteria. At the moment, we are not excluding any possibilities.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest From left: Chilean president Salvador Allende – who died during Pinochet’s 1973 coup – with Pablo Neruda and communist politician Volodia Teitelboim. Photograph: Bloomsbury

There are various problems for those investigating the poisoning allegations, most significantly the absence of medical records or any convincing evidence as to who had access to Neruda in his dying moments in the Santiago hospital. “We are dealing with many pieces of a puzzle,” said Dr Luna. “We need to gather all possible information to be able to reconstruct what happened in the poet’s final six hours.”

Supporters of the poisoning theory point out that on 22 September 1973, the day before his death, Neruda had been offered safe passage out of Chile to Mexico, from where he would have represented a serious political threat to the military junta in Santiago. The poet chose to delay his departure.

It has also been noted that another political opponent of the regime, former president Eduardo Frei Montalva, died in the same Santiago hospital, the Santa María Clinic, in 1982 after expressing his opposition to the military dictatorship. Frei’s death was initially attributed to septic shock during a routine operation, but a 2006 investigation proved that he had been assassinated with mustard gas and thallium.

The Neruda Foundation in Santiago insists that, more than two years after the initial exhumation of the poet’s body, his remains must be reburied as a matter of urgency. However, some surviving members of Neruda’s family refuse to accept that the matter is closed, forcing a postponement of the reinterment which was originally meant to happen in April.

The family remain divided. One nephew, Bernardo Reyes, has consistently ridiculed the poisoning claims, while another, Rodolfo Reyes, takes the accusations seriously and is urging that all possible tests must be conducted before Neruda’s body is finally returned to his resting-place alongside his third wife, Matilde Urrutia.