Chilean justice ordered that DNA tests on the remains of poet Pablo Neruda, as part of the probe to know the causes of his death, be carried out abroad.
This was ordered by judge Mario Carroza, who in his previous resolution invested the Legal Medical Service (LMS) of Chile to carry out the probe, Neruda’s nephew and lawyer of that family, Rodolfo Reyes said today to daily El Mercurio.
According to the lawyer, the new order does not specify the place where samples will be sent, but it establishes that he and his two brothers will be subject to genetic exams in order to confirm that the exhumed bones from the tomb in Isla Negra, Valparaiso, belong to the writer.
Last July, judge Carroza decided that if identification results do not coincide with those tests, they would be made from the bones of Neruda’s parents, buried in the South.
The study is being made to determine if his death was due to natural causes or murdered on dictator Augusto Pinochet’s orders.
The Chilean Communist Party (PC), who launched the lawsuit, an organization to which the intellectual belonged all his life, as a member of its Central Committee, senator and candidate to the presidency of the Republic.
Reyes is also part of the criminal lawsuit filed by the PC to determine if the cause of death were substances administered to him.
Eduardo Contreras, the lawyer representing the PC, has insisted the first thing to determine in all this process is if the remains exhumed on April 8 really correspond to the poet.
The cause was opened in 2011, after Neruda’s driver, Manuel Araya, revealed that a strange injection was put on the abdomen of the Nobel Literature laureate in 1971, while he was in the Santa Maria clinic.
The poet, who suffered from cancer, died on September 23, 1973, 12 days after the coup against president Salvador Allende.
In a recent interview with Prensa Latina about the investigation process, Contreras insisted there was no guarantee that the bones in the tomb of Isla Negra belonged to Neruda.
In the opinion of the plaintiff lawyer, the procedure is very necessary if we take into account that in the 80s, Pinochet ordered the so-called Televisores operation.
This action implied that the military took the remains of arrested disappeared persons and threw them to the sea, burned them and changed their tombs so if in the future, there would be a judicial probe the bodies could not be found.
“If they did that with many people, why could they not do that too with Neruda?”, asked the jurist.
Via PL