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The Pinochet dictatorship in Chile: the death of Pablo Neruda, a mystery just hours away from being clarified

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Almost 50 years after the death of the Chilean Nobel Prize winner Paul Nerudathe mystery of his death may be hours away from being solved: an international panel of experts will reveal on Friday if the cause was advanced prostate cancer immediately or if the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which days before had taken power, he had something to do.

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About fifteen experts from Canada, Denmark and the United States, meeting in Santiago from January 24, will clarify the origin of the bacterium “Clostridium botulinum” found in a molar of the poet, whose remains were exhumed about ten years ago at his home in Isla Negra, 100 kilometers from Santiago.

The “Clostridium botulinum”, responsible for botulism, is a bacillus that is generally found in the soil and the key is to determine if the sample found has been altered in the laboratory and subsequently inoculated, which would demonstrate third party intervention.

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“It has been found an amount incompatible with life (…) Finally we will know the truth about his death”, which occurred twelve days after the coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, declared Rodolfo Reyes, nephew of Neruda.

“We are advertising portals put an end to a transcendental investigation,” admitted Mario Carroza, who led the cause of Chile’s most famous poet until 2020.

“Pinochet’s Great Enemy”

The investigation started in 2011 after the Communist Party (PC), of which the writer and senator was a member, filed a complaint question the version of the dictatorshipwhich indicated metastatic cancer and cachexia (profound alteration of the organism that appears in the final phase of some diseases) as a cause of death.

The party was based on the testimony of Manuel Araya, former driver of the poet and who supports him he was poisoned with chemicals by the regime when he went to the Santa María Clinic in Santiago due to a deterioration in his health.

Araya was one of the last people to see him alive, along with Neruda’s wife, Matilde Urruziawho “always stated that the disease was under control and that the urologist had predicted some another five years of life“, indicated the historian and journalist Mario Amorós.

Amorós, author of the biography “Neruda. The prince of poets”, recalled that the Nobel laureate had planned a trip to Mexico a few days before he died, aged 69, and that in exile “He would have been Pinochet’s great enemy.”

“Neruda was a man very dangerous to stay in Chile or leave From Chile. After the deaths of Allende and Víctor Jara, there was no other person who united so much” said his grandson in the same vein.

The investigation, which involved three panels of experts, met many obstaclesfrom the lack of collaboration from the clinic to the administrative difficulties for successive governments to finance scientific tests in foreign laboratories, according to the family.

“THE pandemic it also meant a long delay,” Reyes complained.

The great milestone of the investigation occurred in 2017, when the second panel of experts “Clostridium botulinum” detected on the molar and concluded that the author of “Twenty love poems and a desperate song” was not in danger of life when he entered the clinic.

It was also transcendental that it was possible to establish that the doctor who was on duty when the poet died, the one known as “Medical Award”It does not appear in any record since his days in Medical College, which further overshadows this already enigmatic figure.

In the crosshairs of feminism

In Chile, there has been little follow up on the last stretch of the case, something Amorós attributed “to a lack of interest in informing some media about the true extent of the dictatorship’s repression”.

Neruda, author of the famous verse “I like it when you shut up”, She has also been in the spotlight of the powerful Chilean feminist movement for several years, which calls him macho and that he boasted in one of his texts that he had committed a violation.

Soledad Falabella, of the University of Chile, explained that the work of the Nobel Prize winner began to be revisited following #NiUnaMenos, #MeToo and the so-called “Feminist May” of 2018 in Chile.

“Reading Neruda can no longer be just a laudatory reading of his representativeness as a vate (poet) of the people. Reading Neruda today requires us be able to exercise a critical attitudecapable of questioning its heteropatriarchal normativity,” he said.

However, he warned, “a critical reading today must also resist the violence of the hypocritical police who ask to throw everything overboard”.

The author is an EFE journalist

ap

Source: Clarin

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