Cancer Didn’t Kill Pablo Neruda, Panel Finds. Was it Murder?

Pablo Neruda after winning the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Credit Laurent Rebours/Associated Press

SANTIAGO, Chile — The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, a Nobel laureate, did not die of cancer, as his death certificate indicated, according to a group of international forensic experts who analyzed samples of his remains.
The conclusion, announced on Friday in Santiago, Chile’s capital, is likely to increase speculation that Neruda may have been murdered.

A former diplomat and senator from the Communist Party, Neruda died at 69 on Sept. 23, 1973, two weeks after a military coup toppled the leftist government of Salvador Allende. Cancer was reported as the cause of death.

But in 2011, his former driver, Manuel Araya, asserted in an interview with a Mexican magazine that doctors at the private clinic in Santiago where Neruda was being treated poisoned him by injecting an unknown substance into his stomach. Mr. Araya did not witness the injection, but he said that Neruda described it to him from his deathbed when the two men were alone.Continue reading the main story

In 2013, Judge Mario Carroza ordered the exhumation of Neruda’s remains and sent samples to forensic genetics laboratories in Canada and Denmark for analysis.Photo

Forensic experts at a news conference on Friday in Santiago, Chile. An examination of Neruda’s skeletal remains, they said, revealed cancer cachexia was not the cause of death. CreditRodrigo Garrido/Reuters

These experts have now cast doubt on the official cause of death and said they found potentially deadly bacteria in one of the samples, a molar.

Neruda’s death certificate established the cause of death as cancer cachexia, which involves significant weight loss, but the forensic specialists unanimously found that to be impossible.

“That cannot be correct,” said Dr. Niels Morling, of the University of Copenhagen’s department of forensic medicine, who participated in the analysis. “There was no indication of cachexia. He was an obese man at the time of death. All other circumstances in his last phase of life pointed to some kind of infection.”


The actual cause of death, as well as the origin of the bacteria, is still unknown. According to the panel of experts, the deadly bacteria could have seeped into Neruda’s skeletal remains from the burial site or been derived from the decomposition process.

“We can’t confirm how the bacteria got there,” said Debi Poinar, a research assistant in the anthropology department at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. “We have to be very careful because there are a lot of bacteria that have their origin in the soil and some of those bacteria are the most pathogenic. We have some indications that it’s an old bacteria, not a modern or laboratory contaminant.”

After delivering its findings to Judge Carroza, the panel was asked to continue researching for another year to try to determine the origin of the bacteria, which could determine whether Neruda was murdered.