Poet's body exhumed: Was Pablo Neruda poisoned?
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Chilean forensic experts exhumed the body of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda on Monday, trying to solve a four-decade mystery about the death of one the greatest poets of the 20th century.
The official version is that that the poet died from prostate cancer and the trauma of witnessing the 1973 military coup that led to the persecution and killing of many of his friends. But his driver and many other Chileans say Neruda was murdered by agents of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's brutal dictatorship.
Experts were concerned that high salinity and humidity could affect the exhumation at Neruda's home in Isla Negra, a rocky outcropping overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
But Patricio Bustos, head of Chile's medical legal service, said Neruda's casket is in good shape after the one-hour exhumation. After draping Neruda's coffin in the Chilean national flag, forensics workers took his remains to the capital for tests. They could also be analyzed abroad and Bustos said they have offers from labs in the United States and Europe.
Read more: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0408/Poet-s-body-exhumed-Was-Pablo-Neruda-poisoned
Exhumed the same day Pinochet was reunited with his ladyfriend
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April 10, 2013
Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady
Posted by Jon Lee Anderson
It’s curious, historically speaking, that Margaret Thatcher died on the same day that forensic specialists, in Chile, exhumed the remains of the late, great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The author of the epic “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” and the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature, Neruda died at the age of sixty-nine, supposedly of prostate cancer, just twelve days after the violent September 11, 1973, military coup launched by army chief Augusto Pinochet against the country’s elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende. Warplanes had strafed the Presidential palace, and Allende had bravely held out, but committed suicide with a rifle given to him by Cuba’s President Fidel Castro as Pinochet’s goons stormed into the Presidential palace. Neruda was a close friend and supporter of Allende’s; he was ill, but in the midst of planning to leave the country for Mexico, where he had been invited to go into exile. When he was on his deathbed in a clinic, his home had been broken into by soldiers and trashed.
At his funeral, a large crowd of mourners marched through the streets of Santiago—a grim city that was otherwise empty except for military vehicles. At his gravesite, in one of the only known acts of public defiance in the wake of the coup, the mourners sang the “Internationale” and saluted Neruda and also Allende. As they did, the regime’s men were going around the city, burning the books of authors it didn’t like, while hunting down those it could find to torture or kill.
A couple of years ago, Neruda’s former driver came forth to express his suspicion that Neruda had been poisoned, saying that he’d heard from the poet that doctors gave him an injection and that, immediately afterward, Neruda’s condition had worsened drastically. There are other tidbits of evidence that bolster his theory, but nothing conclusive. Forensic science, in the end, may provide the answer to a nagging historic question.
Why bring Maggie Thatcher into it? In a tribute Monday, President Barack Obama said she had been “one of the great champions of freedom and liberty.” Actually, she hadn’t. Thatcher was a fierce Cold Warrior, and when it came to Chile never mustered quite the appropriate amount of compassion for the people Pinochet killed in the name of anti-Communism. She preferred talking about his much-vaunted “Chilean economic miracle.”
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/04/neruda-pinochet-thatcher-chile-murder-exhumed.html#ixzz2Q2P2auem
