An international team of genomics experts and forensic specialists on Wednesday said it would study the remains of Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda to try to solve the cause of his death.
The left-wing poet died in the chaos following the 1973 military coup led by late Chilean president General Augusto Pinochet. Some people have speculated he was poisoned by agents of the right-wing dictatorship.
Neruda’s body was exhumed in 2013, but tests showed no toxic agents in his bones.
However, the Chilean government last year said that “it’s clearly possible and highly probable that a third party” was involved in his death, although it added that more tests needed to be carried out.
The remains of Neruda’s bones and teeth are to be analyzed by McMaster University’s ancient DNA center in Canada, and the University of Copenhagen’s department of forensic medicine.
The panel of experts is to focus on identifying pathogenic bacteria that might have caused Neruda’s death.
The researchers said they plan to use techniques to “extract, purify and enrich fragments of the bacterial DNA,” which they hope will yield genomic data that will help solve the nearly 43-year old mystery surrounding his death.
“The search for the truth of the death of the poet, Pablo Neruda, is a forensic challenge. We hope that the work of the Chilean Human Rights Program and the scientists will contribute to the reconciliation between the various groups in Chile,” the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Forensic Medicine director Niels Morling said in a statement.
Neruda was best known for his love poems. However, he was also a Chilean Communist Party politician and a friend of former Chilean president Salvador Allende, a Marxist, who killed himself rather than surrender to troops during the Sept. 11, 1973, coup.
Neruda, who was 69 and had prostate cancer, was traumatized by the coup and the persecution and killing of his friends. He planned to go into exile, where he would have been an influential voice against the dictatorship.
However, the day before his planned departure, he was taken by ambulance to a clinic in Santiago, where he was said to have died on Sept. 23 from natural causes.
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