No evidence found that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was poisoned

 

A forensic analysis has found no evidence that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was poisoned. Experts were also able to confirm that the Nobel laureate suffered from advanced prostate cancer when he died more than 40 years ago.

The findings were released on 8 November by the Chilean judge Mario Carroza. He ordered the exhumation and analysis of Neruda’s remains in April, after the poet’s former driver, Manuel Araya, alleged that Neruda had been poisoned by government agents. Neruda, an outspoken left-wing intellectual, died on 23 September 1973, 12 days after a coup d’état in Chile brought the right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet to power.

The analysis of Neruda’s bones was carried out by an interdisciplinary group of 13 experts and three observers in Chile, Spain and the United States. The group checked the poet’s bones for more than 2,000 different chemicals, including thallium and arsenic, which were widely used as poisons during Neruda’s lifetime. The tests did find derivatives of dipyrone, a medicine used in the 1970s against prostate cancer.

“Our results mean that there is no forensic evidence of any unnatural cause of death,” says Francisco Etxeberria, a forensic anthropologist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain and a member of the study team.

Previous analyses, including about 5,000 X-ray scans of Neruda’s bones and further microscopic examinations, revealed widespread evidence of metastatic prostate cancer within the bones, which were well-preserved.

The fact that experts found residue of medicines in Neruda’s bones makes it less likely that the poet was poisoned by an agent that has dissipated, Etxebarria says. The team did not, however, check for poisons such as sarin gas that by now would have degraded to undetectable levels.

Carroza still maintains that it is impossible to establish whether Neruda was murdered. At an 8 November press conference, he said that additional tests may be ordered, including one to make sure that the remains exhumed from Neruda’s tomb at his country house in Isla Negra, Chile, belonged to the poet.