The former driver of Pablo Neruda, whose testimony was decisive in supporting the thesis of the assassination in 1973 of the Nobel Prize for Literature, died at the age of 77 in Chile, the Chilean Communist Party announced on Wednesday.
“The testimony of Manuel Araya, his management and his courage were decisive for the existence of the elements that gave rise to the complaint for the death of the poet that the Party presented with his family”, indicates the Communist Party in a press release , specifying that the former driver died on Tuesday in the city of San Antonio, west of Santiago.
The hypothesis of an assassination in 1973 of the 1971 Nobel appeared in 2011 after the revelations of Manuel Araya, at the time a young activist whom the Chilean Communist Party had appointed as assistant and driver of the writer, himself a member of the Left. Until then, the official version was that the poet died on September 23, 1973 of prostate cancer. According to this theory, which has not been scientifically elucidated, Pablo Neruda would have succumbed to a mysterious injection made the day before his departure for Mexico, where he planned to go into exile to lead the opposition to the Pinochet regime (1973-1990). “Neruda was a danger for Pinochet (…) Pinochet was not interested in the fact that (Neruda) left the country for any reason whatsoever”, declared Manuel Araya last February to insist on the version of the ‘assassination.
Although he had supported the thesis of the assassination for nearly forty years, it was not until June 2011 that the PC had demanded a judicial inquiry which made possible the exhumation and toxicological analyses. However, the panel of experts who investigated the mysterious death of the poet could not determine whether or not his death was due to poisoning.
The bacterium clostridium botulinum “was present at the time of his death but we still don’t know why. We just know it shouldn’t be there,” said Hendrik and Debi Poinar of Canada’s McMaster University, both members of the panel that submitted its findings to the Chilean judge in charge of the case in February.
