Chile Exhumes Nobel Poet’s Body to Investigate Claim of Poisoning

Musicians played music during the exhumation of the remains of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda on Monday. By PASCALE BONNEFOY Published: April 8, 2013 SANTIAGO, Chile — The remains of Chile’s Nobel Prize-winning poet, Pablo Neruda, were exhumed Monday so that they could be examined for signs of whether he might have died of poisoning instead of cancer, the widely believed cause for almost 40 years. The court-ordered exhumation seeks to establish what caused Mr. Neruda’s death in a private clinic in Santiago on Sept. 23, 1973, less than two weeks after a military coup toppled the nation’s socialist president, Salvador Allende, a close friend of the poet. Mr. Neruda, a prominent member of the Communist Party and a former senator, had prostate cancer and was being treated in Paris, where he was an ambassador appointed by President Allende. He returned to Chile in November 1972. Best known for his romantic poetry, Mr. Neruda won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. Shortly after the coup, as the new military rulers persecuted supporters of Mr. Allende, troops looted and destroyed Mr. Neruda’s house in the capital and twice raided his home in Isla Negra, where he lived with his third wife, Matilde Urrutia. The Mexican government had offered to fly the couple out of the country, and days before he was scheduled to travel, Mr. Neruda was admitted to the Santa María clinic in the capital. In 2011, Mr. Neruda’s driver at the time, Manuel Araya, publicly claimed that Mr. Neruda had not been in critical condition beforehand and that a day before his death Mr. Neruda, 69, told him that a doctor had given him an injection in the stomach that made him “burn inside.” His health quickly deteriorated. Mr. Araya contends that the poet was poisoned by doctors in the clinic, although there are no material witnesses to confirm the accusation. Few of Mr. Neruda’s relatives and friends believe Mr. Araya’s version, nor does the Pablo Neruda Foundation, which manages his estate. But there are contradictory accounts regarding his health conditions and how advanced the cancer was, and it is not clear why Mr. Araya kept silent all these years. Mr. Araya said that he had tried to tell Communist Party leaders at the time, but that no one would listen. Almost four decades later, he again approached the party to relay his suspicions about Mr. Neruda’s death. This time, the party filed a criminal lawsuit to have the courts establish the truth. “Once there is a doubt, I believe it is extremely important to clear it up and use the technological means at our disposal to determine the poet’s cause of death,” said Judge Mario Carroza, who is in charge of the investigation. “We will not spare any possibility.” Mr. Neruda and Ms. Urrutia were buried together in a grave facing the Pacific Ocean at his seaside home in Isla Negra, about 70 miles west of Santiago. His remains were transported Monday to the morgue in the capital, where Chilean and international forensics experts will examine them. Results of the analysis could take several months.