Chilean poet Neruda did not die of cancer, say experts

Santiago, October 21

A team of international scientists said today that Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda did not die of cancer or malnutrition, rejecting the official cause of death but not laying to rest one of the great mysteries of post-coup Chile.

While saying what the poet and Communist Party politician did not die of, the experts did not say what he did die of or address suspicions that he was murdered by agents of Gen Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship after the country’s 1973 military takeover.

Panel members said they will continue to identify pathogenic bacteria that might have caused Neruda’s death to determine if a third party was involved. The poet, who was 69 and suffering from prostate cancer, died in Chile’s post-coup chaos. The official version was that he died of cachexia, or weakness and wasting of the body due to chronic illness, in this case cancer.

“The fundamental conclusions are the invalidity of the death certificate when it comes to cachexia as a cause of death,” said Aurelio Luna, one of the panel’s experts. “We still can’t exclude nor affirm the natural or violent cause of Neruda’s death.”

The body was exhumed in 2013 to determine the cause of his death but those tests showed no toxic agents or poisons in his bone. His family and driver demanded further investigation. In 2015, Chile’s government said it’s “highly probable that a third party” was responsible for his death. Neruda was reburied in his favourite home overlooking the Pacific Coast last year.

Neruda, best known for his love poems, was a friend of socialist President Salvador Allende, who killed himself rather than surrender to troops during the September 11, 1973, coup led by Pinochet.

Neruda planned to go into exile, where he would have been a voice against the dictatorship. But a day before his departure, he was taken to a clinic in Santiago where he had been treated for cancer and other ailments. Neruda officially died there on September 23 of natural causes. But suspicions that the dictatorship had a hand in the death remained long after Chile returned to democracy in 1990. — AP