Chile Admits Pablo Neruda May Have Been Killed by Pinochet Regime

"It is necessary to judge these hands stained

by the dead he killed with his terror;
the dead from under the beaten earth
are rising up like seeds of sorrow"
Pablo Neruda (Portrait of The Man)

For the first time the Chilean Government has acknowledged that Nobel prize winning poet Pablo Neruda may have been murdered by the regime of Augusto Pinochet during the US-backed military coup that led to Pinochet seizing power in September 1973.

 

A report in the online publication Common Dreams notes: 

 

Chile's Interior Ministry made the statement in response to a ministry document published in May and obtained by the Spanish newspaper El País. "It's clearly possible and highly probable that a third party" was responsible for Neruda's death, the document said, adding that he was either injected with or orally administered a foreign substance hours before his death.

 

Neruda died just 12 days after the 11 September 1973 military coup, in which Pinochet seized power and overthrew and murdered Salvador Allende, the democratically elected President of Chile. Neruda was a political ally and supporter of Allende. Around 3,000 people were killed during  the brutal 17-year-long Pinochet dictatorship.
 

It was long thought that Neruda died of prostate cancer, but claims by family members and his former driver led to suspicion that the Pinochet regime poisoned Neruda to avoid the possibility that he would become a voice of protest and dissidence overseas.
 

Neruda's driver claimed that while Neruda was making final preparations for exile in Mexico, doctors injected the poet with a substance, after which his health rapidly deteriorated.

 

In 2013 Chilean investigators exhumed Neruda's body for examination. 

 

The initial testing failed to turn up signs Neruda was poisoned, but the judge investigating the case ordered further tests  for substances that were not previously included in the examination. In January 2015, the Head of the Chilean Government's human rights departments said:

 

"There is initial evidence that he was poisoned and in that sense the signs point to the intervention of specific agents ... that could constitute a crime against humanity."

 

Ariel Dorfman on parallels between contemporary Egypt and Allende's military dictatorship in Chile

"After all the lives lost and sacrifices made, the hopes and aspirations, everything that led to the revolution in Egypt in the first place remains as is. The military owns 40% of the Egyptian economy. In a country of dire poverty and starvation, Egypt has the highest number of billionaires in the Middle East - second only to Saudi Arabia. Yet 1% of the population owns 90% of the Egyptian economy. The brutality of the security forces, which played a huge role in igniting the revolution, remains the same if not much worse. Corruption and monopolization of economic opportunities and access to capital remains the same. The few obscenely rich families that supported Mubarak's regime now support Sisi, and these are the families that own and control virtually all of the media outlets, telecommunications, construction and transportation industries. Even more, Sisi is working hard to reclaim Egypt's position as the playground bordello for indulgent sojourners from the Gulf countries"
Khaled Abou El Fadl

The Chilean playwright, novelist and public intellectual Ariel Dorfman notes here the parallels between the rise of Egypt's new President General Abdel Fattah el Sissi and another military dictator, former Chilean  general turned president Augusto Pinochet, who took power in Chile in 1973 in a US supported military coup which overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.

Dorfman sees similarities between Santiago Chile in 1973 and Egypt 2014, in particular, a military coup which overthrew a democratically elected government (El Sissi led the 2013 military coup that overthrew the last democratically elected Egyptian leader Mohammed Morsi), followed by sustained bloodshed and a major crackdown on dissenters and opponents, resulting in the establishment of a military dictatorship.

As Khaled Abou El Fadl writes there are serious questions about the legitimacy of el-Sissi's 'make believe' election. 

The 2014 election took place against a backdrop of prolonged crackdown and oppression by the military, in which an estimated 40,000 political activists have been imprisoned, 3000 protesters killed and journalists imprisoned. The youth movement that inspired the 2011 revolution has been banned.

Khaled Abou El Fadl reminds us of the military's recent actions in the lead up to the election:

In November 2013, Egypt issued a new law that all but bans any and all protests. On 28 April 2014, the Court of Urgent Affairs banned the April 6 Movement - a movement that played an instrumental role in the 25 January 2011 revolution and the 30 June 2013 protests against President Muhammad Morsi. But after the April 6 Movement became critical of the military's repressive measures, the Movement was accused of "espionage," "defaming Egypt" and of undermining state institutions. Many of its members who played such an active role in bringing down Mubarak and in criticizing Morsi find themselves in prison on trumped up charges. 

Many of its members who played such an active role in bringing down Mubarak and in criticizing Morsi find themselves in prison on trumped up charges. In January 2014, American University of Cairo professor and former parliamentarian Amr Hamzawy was charged with "insulting the judiciary" because of a Twitter post criticizing a judicial ruling that closed down three non-profit educational organizations that promote democracy. Most recently, Bassem Sabry, who is well known for his blog Muwatin 'Arabi (An Arab Citizen), died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 31 - security forces claim that he "accidentally fell from his balcony."

Khaled Abou El Fad also reminds us that the US Government has committed its support and military aid has begun to flow to the military dictatorship. 

Was Pablo Neruda murdered by the junta of General Pinochet?

"It is necessary to judge these hands stained
by the dead he killed with his terror;
the dead from under the beaten earth
are rising up like seeds of sorrow"
Pablo Neruda (Portrait of The Man)

The New Yorker on the strange irony that on the day Margaret Thatcher died Chilean authorities were exhuming the remains of legendary Chilean poet Pablo Neruda to determine whether he was murdered by the Chilean junta led by Margaret Thatcher's great friend and ally General Auguste Pinochet.

Neruda died just 12 days after the 11 September 1973 military coup that saw Pinochet seize power in a military coup that overthrew and murdered the democratically elected President of Chile Salvador Allende. Neruda had long been a political ally and supporter of Allende. Around 3,000 people were killed during  the brutal 17-year-long Pinochet dictatorship.

It was long thought that Neruda died of prostate cancer, but recent claims by his former driver have led to suspicion that the Pinochet regime poisoned Neruda to avoid the possibility that he would become a voice of protest and dissidence overseas.

Neruda's driver claims that while Neruda was making final preparations for exile in Mexico, doctors injected the poet with a substance, after which his health rapidly deteriorated.

 The New Yorker article continues:

"In a country where, for decades, history was buried, it is fitting for Chileans to dig up Neruda to find out the truth of what happened to him. In a sense, Neruda was Chile’s Lorca, the Spanish poet who was murdered in the first weeks of Francisco Franco’s Fascist coup of Spain in 1936, and whose blood has been a stain on the conscience of his country ever since.

Chile now has a chance to do the right thing by its poet. Neruda’s beach home, at Isla Negra, some miles from Santiago on the coast, is a lovely, modest villa on a rocky beach, with windows that look out to sea and the poet’s lyrical collection of old ship mermaids as decorations. He and his widow, Matilde Urrutia, were buried there, and that is where the investigators went to look for the truth of what happened. In the end, even if Neruda died of cancer, as was said at the time, his exhumation is an opportunity to reinforce the message to authoritarians everywhere that a poet’s words will always outlast theirs, and the blind praise of their powerful friends"

The British Guardian has this story about why Neruda was such a significant political figure at the time and why he was such a threat to the Chilean junta led by General Pinochet. At the time of his death, just two weeks after the coup that overthrow Chilean President Salvador Allende, Neruda was planning political exile in Mexico where he intended to denounce and campaign against the military regime.

 The Guardian writes:

That made the poet dangerous to some very powerful people, who had shown they would stop at nothing to defend their interests. They had ousted his friend, Salvador Allende, from the presidency less than a fortnight earlier. Allende died in a coup that was as much about silencing dissident voices as bringing about regime change. Another voice, that of popular singer Víctor Jara, was cut off four days later. Neruda remained. He was perhaps the loudest. His face certainly the most recognisable worldwide. He was too dangerous.

Members of the junta are on record expressing the view on the morning of September 22 that if Neruda flew into exile, his plane would fall into the sea. In the afternoon, radio stations under military control announced the poet would probably die in the next few hours, at a time when he was still awake in the hospital. The following day he was dead.

That historical mystery alone explains why his body was exhumed this week.