Toxic bacteria were in the bloodstream of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda when he died, McMaster scientists have found
A toxic bacterium was present in the body of famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda when he died half a century ago, scientists at McMaster University have found.
The latest discovery aligns with claims that Nobel laureate Neruda, who was also a Communist Party politician, was assassinated days after Chile’s socialist government was overthrown in a military coup in 1973.
Since 2016, McMaster evolutionary geneticists and forensic scientists in Hamilton and the University of Copenhagen have been analyzing bone and tooth samples to rule out other possible causes of death and to look for deadly pathogens.
The scientists have been in Chile for the past two weeks and presented their findings to a court. The hearing ended on Wednesday.
McMaster researcher Debi Poinar tells The current‘s Matt Galloway Thursday that while researchers can definitively say the bacteria causing botulism Clostridium botulinum was in Neruda’s bloodstream when he died, they cannot say for sure that it killed him.
“But then again, why is it there?” said Poinar. “It’s not a natural organism that should be present in your body for any other reason.”
In the days after the 9/11 coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, Neruda, 69, planned to go into exile, where he would be an influential critic of the dictatorship. A day before his departure, he was taken by ambulance to a clinic in Santiago, where he officially died of natural causes on September 23.
“He was such a great poet”
Hamilton poet Constanza Duran was born in Chile and was 17 when the coup took place. She told CBC Hamilton that soldiers raided her family’s home and destroyed all their belongings. Family members and friends were arrested and tortured. Many never returned.
She described Neruda as “at that time dear to all”.
“He was such a great poet, an amazing poet,” Duran said. “He was our poet.”
When he died, it was a time of sorrow and chaos, with “people dying all around us,” she said.
“To think he was murdered wasn’t too far off.”
During the bloody dictatorship that ended in 1990, more than 40,000 people were imprisoned, tortured or murdered.
Suspicions that the dictatorship was behind Neruda’s death spun into the 21st century, leading to his body being exhumed in 2013 and shin, thigh and tooth samples taken for further study.
In recent years, Neruda has come under increased scrutiny for admitting to raping a cleaning lady, which he wrote about in his memoirs published after his death.
The Hamilton and Copenhagen scientists previously determined that Neruda had not died of prostate cancer, for which he was being treated at the time of his death. They also ruled out malnutrition before looking for different types of bacteria that had been used as biological weapons.
As for what Neruda might have experienced had he died of botulism, Poinar said he would have suffered paralysis or septicemia, a serious blood infection.
Duran, the poet, fled Chile in 1975 and settled in Canada in 1988. She said the new findings “brought much sorrow” and that if he were murdered it would be a “horrible act of cruelty”.
