Chile: Justice orders reopening the investigation into the death of poet Pablo Neruda due to possible poisoning

MADRID, 20 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –

An appeals court in Santiago de Chile has ordered to reopen the investigation into the death of the Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner in Literature Pablo Neruda, who died under strange circumstances that point to possible poisoning during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The first Chamber of the appeal court has unanimously decided to revoke a previous resolution in which the case was archived by Judge Paola Plaza, alleging that the investigation “is not exhausted”, since there are “precise procedures that “could contribute to clarifying the facts.”

Specifically, the Chilean Justice has ordered a new calligraphic examination of the death certificate issued by the doctor Roberto Vargas Salazar, as well as an analysis of the results published in 2017 by experts from the universities of McMaster and Copenhagen, according to the newspaper. ‘Third’.

The court has also summoned archivist Peter Kornbluh, an analyst specializing in US interference in the 1973 coup d’état, and former Army Health Director Eduardo Arriagada Rehren, sentenced in 2017 to 20 years in prison for homicide, to testify.

The Chilean Justice has determined that Arriagada will have to appear to explain “his intelligence work based on ‘costridium botulinum'” and expose “identical events for which he was convicted” for the death of the communist militant Archibaldo Morales Villanueva, announcer and collaborator of the newspaper ‘La Región’ who died in the San Fernando prison.

NERUDA’S DEATH

The Chilean writer, who was then part of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, died on September 23, 1973, two weeks after the coup d’état led by Pinochet that overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende.

Manuel Araya, Pablo Neruda’s driver and personal assistant, has repeatedly denied the version that the reason for his death was due to advanced prostate cancer, as suggested in the first hypotheses, and has assured that he was murdered during the Pinochet regime.

According to Araya, the poet received a “deadly injection” by agents of the regime while he was at the Santa María clinic, the same center where former president Eduardo Frei died nine years later and in strange circumstances.

Likewise, the writer’s lawyer and nephew, Rodolfo Reyes, also argued that “a large amount” of ‘costridium botulinum’ was found in Neruda’s skeleton, a pathogenic bacteria capable of causing botulism, a disease caused by a toxin that attacks the nerves of the body.

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