February 15 |

The nephew of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Rodolfo Reyes, said Monday that the forensic report on the cause of death of the Nobel Prize in Literature indicates that he would have been poisoned with a botulinum bacterium in September 1973, a few hours before a flight that would have taken him to exile in Mexico.

This conclusion would dismantle the official thesis that he died of metastatic prostate cancer.

The affirmation of Reyes, who besides being a nephew is a lawyer in the judicial case of Neruda’s death, is known a couple of days before a group of forensic experts from Canada, Chile and Denmark deliver a report that will establish if the poet was poisoned or if he died of cancer, which is the official explanation that was delivered in September 1973, 12 days after the military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende.

The results of the forensic expertise were to be released at the beginning of February, but the convocation was suspended due to connection problems of the specialists.

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Reyes, interviewed by AP, said that the forensic report from laboratories in Canada and Denmark indicates the presence in Neruda’s remains of “a large amount of Clostridium botulinum, which is incompatible with human life”, a fact that the relative first confirmed to the Spanish news agency EFE.

The botulinum toxin is produced by a bacterium that can cause problems to the nervous system and even death.

According to Reyes, as a lawyer in the court case, he had access to the results of the tests of the laboratories in Canada and Denmark, which were made after the same forensic group indicated in 2017 that other experts had already pointed to the presence of the toxin in the bone remains and in a molar of the poet.

Reyes stated that the laboratory reports ratified that “there was no external contamination, that the Clostridium botulinum was endogenous”, that is, internal, and that it would have been given to the poet “while he was alive”.

He added that the only reports missing in the case investigated by Judge Paola Plaza are those elaborated by a couple of experts from each of the laboratories, which would be received tomorrow or the day after.

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The first to affirm that the poet was poisoned was his driver, Manuel Araya, who has reiterated to AP that while Neruda was hospitalized in the private clinic, an alleged doctor gave him an injection in his stomach while he and the poet’s wife, Matilde Urrutia, were carrying out some of the poet’s errands in Isla Negra, 110 kilometers northwest of the Chilean capital. He said that the version was given to him by a nurse.

Urrutia and Araya hospitalized him while waiting for the plane to take him to his exile in Mexico. In a telephone conversation with AP, the Mexican ambassador at the time, Gonzalo Martínez Corbalá, said that on Saturday, September 22, he went to pick him up at the clinic to take him to the airport, but the poet postponed the trip to Monday and died on Sunday.

The conversation with Martínez was in 2017, shortly before his passing.

Neruda was a lifelong militant of the Communist Party, which after several years accepted the driver’s complaint and in 2011 filed a lawsuit to investigate what killed him.

The Nobel’s remains were exhumed in April 2013 and, seven months later, the same experts indicated that no “relevant chemical agents” were found that could be related to his death.

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However, at that time the Chilean forensic institute lacked the latest technology to detect a poisoning that could have occurred 40 years earlier.

In 2017, they announced the presence of the toxin and requested genetic tests to “confirm or exclude the action of third parties in the poet’s death.”