The Unsolved Mystery of Pablo Neruda's Alleged Poisoning

Summary

Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda died in Santiago on September 23, 1973, twelve days after the military coup that toppled President Salvador Allende. His official cause of death was listed as prostate cancer, but suspicions of foul play have persisted for decades, fueled by accounts from his personal driver that Neruda said a doctor had injected him with an unknown substance. An investigation was opened in 2011 and his remains were exhumed in 2013 for forensic examination.

In 2023, Canadian researchers published findings confirming the presence of Clostridium botulinum — a bacterium that produces a potentially lethal neurotoxin — in samples from Neruda's teeth. The discovery kept alive the possibility of a covert assassination by agents of the Pinochet regime, though researchers cautioned they could not determine whether the bacterium was introduced intentionally. The case remains unsolved, suspended between credible forensic anomalies and the absence of definitive proof of murder.