So they exhumed Neruda’s body, as new evidence had surfaced that maybe it wasn’t prostate cancer that killed him, but rather agents of the Pinochet government threatened by his eloquent opposition. Among other circumstantial information, this:
In 2011, when Neruda’s driver Manuel Araya claimed that the poet had been given a mysterious injection on the afternoon of his death, he cited that fear as his sole reason for not coming forward earlier. According to Araya, that shot made Neruda “hot, red, and feverish” and killed him within hours.
The result of the new forensics: murder. There is even a suspect:
But Price [a mysterious “doctor” in Neruda’s room the day he died] did not appear in any of the hospital’s records as a treating doctor and Draper [the real doctor] said he never saw him again after the day he left him with Neruda. Moreover Price’s description of a blond, blue eyed, tall man, matches Michael Townley, the CIA double agent who worked with Chilean secret police under Pinochet. Townley was taken into the U.S. witness protection program after acknowledging having killed prominent Pinochet critics in Washington and Buenos Aires.
As Neruda writes in the Canto General in a section called “The Enemies”:
Then, on the site
where the assassinated fell,
they lowered the flags to bathe them in blood,
to raise them again in the assassin’s presence
For these dead, our dead,
I demand punishment.