Death of Pablo Neruda, an investigation that does not end

Court of Appeals ordered reopening the case, always on the thesis that the Nobel Prize in Literature was murdered by agents of the dictatorship.

Santiago. 20/2/2024. The investigation into the real causes of the death of the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Pablo Neruda, continues, despite moments when it seemed that everything had ended.

Now, the First Chamber of the Court of Appeals of Santiago decided to reopen the investigation into Neruda’s death, which occurred on September 23, 1973, 12 days after the coup d’état led by the Armed Forces and Carabineros, supported by the political right. . There is a thesis that the writer was murdered by agents of tyranny, with the support of doctors, while he remained hospitalized.

The resolution to reopen the investigation was unanimous in the First Chamber of the Court of Appeals, from where it was noted that “since it appears from the background that the investigation is not exhausted, there are precise procedures that could contribute to the clarification of the facts, the reopening of the summary.”

It was indicated that this aims to “carry out the procedures requested by the plaintiffs, nephews of the victim, as well as by the Communist Party”, among which the carrying out of a new calligraphic expertise regarding the death certificate, practice a meta-expertise that allows review and interpret the results of the expertise carried out by experts from McMaster and Copenhagen Universities.

Likewise, the director of the Chilean Documentation project, Peter Kornbluh, will be summoned to give a judicial statement, “in the terms requested by the complainant”, and the doctor Eduardo Arriagada Rehren, former head of Health of the Army and who was sentenced in 2017 to 20 years. prison for the aggravated homicide of two inmates in 1981.

Judge Paola Plaza closed the investigation on September 25 of last year, but both Pablo Neruda’s relatives and the Communist Party – in which Neruda had been a member since he was young – appealed the decision.