Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Disinterring Pablo Neruda will prove nothing

I see that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's remains have been disinterred, and a Canadian and Danish team are poking through the bits looking for evidence of foul play in his death. All of which may be very interesting from an academic point of view, but, I ask myself: what really is the point?
Neruda, although most famous for his sensual love poetry, was an outspoken supporter and advisor of Chile's socialist leader Salvador Allende in the early 1970s, and himself served a term as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party, and later also as Chile's ambassador to France.
As it happened, Neruda was back in Chile in September 1973, receiving treatment for prostrate cancer, when General Augusto Pinochet staged his US-backed military coup and began his reign of terror in Chile. Less than two weeks later, Allende was dead after a mysterious suicide, and Neruda was also dead, officially from heart failure. About 6 hours before his death, Neruda had left his hospital after being injected with an unknown substance, an injection that Neruda was convinced was intended to kill him on orders from Pinochet.
So, yes, the circumstances were suspicious to say the very least, and I think that most people, unless they have a very specific axe to grind, just ASSUME that Neruda was in fact murdered on General Pinochet's orders.
But what, then, is the value of the current investigation, which, as even the venerable doctors carrying it out admit, may find some kind of biological agent in Neruda's body, but will not answer the question of whether or not it was deliberately put there, or on whose orders. Allende too had his body exhumed in 2011, in order to look for evidence of murder, and the international investigation concluded definitively that Allende had in fact committed suicide with his own AK-47 assault rifle. Was he "forced" to do it? We still don't know.
And, even if it were possible to tie Neruda's death back to Pinochet, what then? Pinochet died in 2006 with 300 criminal charges still pending against him for human rights violations, tax evasion and embezzlement. He is known to have caused over 3,000 deaths and "forced disappearances" over his 17-year rule, along with up to 80,000 people forcibly interned, and as many as 30,000 tortured. He is universally reviled as a bad man. Neruda's death would merely add one more to that death total. Leave him peace, I say.

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