Chilean justice reopens the 'Neruda case', orders an Army doctor to be investigated and asks to review the report on the poet's death

A chamber of the Court of Appeals of Santiago has unanimously resolved this Tuesday to reopen the investigation into the circumstances of the death of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who died at the Santa María Clinic, in the municipality of Providencia, on September 23, 1973. , 12 days after the coup d'état by Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) in which the socialist president Salvador Allende (1970-1973) was overthrown.

The summary of the case, open for almost 13 years to determine whether the death was due to natural causes, prostate cancer with metastasis or poisoning, was closed on September 25, 2023 by Judge Paola Plaza, who considered all the proceedings concluded and chose not to issue prosecutions.

However, judges Martiza Villandangos, Elsa Barrientos and Jorge Gómez have considered that the investigation is not exhausted and have ordered the carrying out of seven procedures “that could contribute to clarifying the facts,” according to the ruling.

Among them, a calligraphic examination of the poet's death certificate;

the completion of a

meta-expertise

or new expert opinion that reviews the conclusions of the panel of experts from the Universities of McMaster and Copenhagen who participated in the case;

and the interrogation of doctor and retired Army officer Arriagada Rehren, who was convicted in 2021 of the murder of radio host and communist sympathizer Archivaldo Morales: he was injected with a dipyridamole compound to cause a heart attack.

In addition, it was decreed that the Investigative Police carry out an age regression expert report on Arriagada to establish what he was like in 1973.

The Nobel Prize winner, whose name was Neftalí Reyes, suffered from metastatic prostate cancer, which was the cause of death for 38 years, but in 2011 his former driver, Manuel Araya, who died in June 2023, said in an interview with the Mexican magazine Proceso who had been killed by a lethal injection at the clinic.

That year the Communist Party (PC), in which the poet was a member, filed a complaint that led to an investigation that was open for 13 years, and it was the same group, together with the lawyer Elisabeth Flores and Rodolfo Reyes, the writer's nephew. , who asked the Court to reopen the case, which has been granted after the allegations that were made on Monday.

Three scientific panels have participated in the case, which have reached divergent conclusions: the first, with forensic experts from the Chilean Legal Medical Service (SML), confirmed in 2013 that the death of Neruda, whose name was Neftalí Reyes, was cancer with metastasis. .

In 2017, international experts found, after an examination of the poet's molar, a toxic substance, Clostridium botulinum, but it was not determined how it got into his body.

Likewise, the specialists questioned the death certificate, which indicates “cancerous cachexia” as the cause of death, which implied that the writer must have been extremely malnourished, but a test of his belt showed that the mark where he fastened it corresponded to a person weighing about 90 kilos.

In February 2023, a third panel of experts concluded, as PC lawyer Manuel Luna told EL PAÍS, that the strain of Clostridium botulinum found in Neruda's body “belonged to the bacteria Alaska E43, the deadliest of this type", and that it was determined that "it was due to an endogenous cause, that is, that it was in Neruda's body before he died."

However, he specified that since this single antecedent “does not allow us, from a technical-scientific basis, to affirm that he was murdered,” they asked the Court for a meta-expertise, which was accepted.

Calligraphic expertise and new interrogation

In the case of the poet's death certificate, the plaintiffs have questioned, in addition to the cause of death, cancer cachexia, the handwriting, which contains different handwritten letters.

Although expert reports had already been carried out in this regard, they insisted before the superior court on new tests, specifically, on the signature that was stamped on the official document in 1973, by Neruda's treating doctor, Roberto Vargas Salazar.

In the certificate instead of Salazar, it says Zalazar, which was questioned by the plaintiffs.

The Court has granted the new expert opinion, despite the fact that in the investigation, which two judges, Mario Carroza and Paola Plaza, have gone through, they had realized that the doctor used to sign his last name in both ways.

Regarding Arriagada Rehen, although he had already testified in the case, he will now be summoned again.

According to lawyer Manuel Luna, his name was mentioned by a nurse at the Santa María Clinic.

Regarding him, the Court of Appeals has ordered that he be questioned “about his intelligence work based on clostridium botulinum and that the identical events for which he was convicted regarding the victim Archivaldo Morales Villanueva be explained.”

In addition, the judges asked the Human Rights Brigade of the Investigative Police to carry out an analysis of the complete file of the murder of the radio host "in order to establish whether there are similarities" between the events that gave rise to the Neruda case.

The doctors who were at the Santa María Clinic when Neruda died remains one of the great mysteries of the case.

The person who raised these suspicions was Sergio Draper, who died in 2022. He was the professional who said, before Judge Carroza, that he handed over the shift to another doctor, whom he had not seen before, and who he identified as a certain "Dr. Price" or Prize.

He pointed out that he was tall, blonde and white-skinned.

With this information from Draper, in 2013 the police prepared a verbal portrait.

Furthermore, a search was started that gave no results, since neither in the clinic nor in the Medical College of Chile nor in the country's medical schools was anyone found with that name or surname.

After the reopening of the Neruda case, the Court of Appeals also ordered other proceedings: the interrogation of Peter Kornbluh, director of the Chilean Documentation Project and an analyst specialized in Chile at the US National Security Archive, based at George Washington University, who has spent years analyzing declassified documents on the interference of the United States in the overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende and its support for the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

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