Sensation in Chile. The most renowned Chilean poet's cause of death is now open for investigation. Again
9:14 AM EST, February 21, 2024
The Noble Prize winner - Pablo Neruda, passed away in 1973 at sixty-nine. He was not only a poet, though, but also a prominent politician. His cause of death was believed to be cancer, but there are several other options, it seems. Chilean court sensationally opens the investigation again.
Pablo Neruda, the great poet of Latin America,
comes from Chile. (...) Pablo Neruda has been a Communist for some ten years. When he describes the misery of his
people, I believe him and I respect his great heart.
When writing, he thinks about his brothers and not
about himself, and so to him the power of the word is
given. But when he paints the joyous, radiant life of
people in the Soviet Union, I stop believing him. I
am inclined to believe him as long as he speaks about
what he knows; I stop believing him when he starts
to speak about what I know myself.
So wrote Czesław Miłosz, the Nobel Prize laureate in literature from 1980, about Pablo Neruda. It is essential to know that Neruda, although mainly a poet, was also an important left-wing Chilean politician. He died in 1973 when the coup of Pinochet was ongoing in Chile. The authorities said that his cause of death was heart issues connected to prostate cancer he had been diagnosed with several years earlier. Neruda was one of the main opponents of Augusto Pinochet, later dictator of Chile, who won high power by the coup Neruda opposed.
The interview with Neruda's former driver in 2011 spread a sensation. He said in an interview that, in fact, it was Pinochet's order for the doctor who treated Neruda in the hospital where he was being hospitalized.
The case is still ongoing and has been a great subject of public debate up to this year. Now, the appeal court in Chile opens the case again. It claims that: "Investigation has not been exhausted and new steps could help clarify the cause of his death."
We have to wait for further steps in order to verify what really happened.
Sources: CBS News
