Santiago de Chile, Dec 7 (EFE) – Judge Paola Plaza of the Santiago Court of Appeals on Thursday rejected a request by the family of poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda and the Chilean Communist Party to reopen the investigation into his controversial death, which occurred in 1973, just 12 days after a military coup that overthrew socialist President Salvador Allende.
In the decision, to which EFE had access, the judge argued that the Chilean state had provided all the resources necessary to shed light on the facts, and therefore the new proceedings requested by the plaintiffs would not lead to a different result.
Plaza argued that the investigation included the participation of «local and foreign experts,» the use of «unprecedented technologies in criminal investigations,» the collection of testimonies, documents and police reports and «all aspects proposed by the parties to clarify the facts.»
For this reason, she considered that the new proceedings requested by the poet’s family and by the Communist Party of Chile, of which he was a member, «are unproductive, have already been undertaken, and are overdue.»
New evidence
On Oct. 11 the Communist party of Chile filed an appeal asking for the expansion of the investigations into the controversial death of the author, who, according to his at the time driver, had been poisoned by coup units with the aim of aggravating his illness and hastening his death.
The request asked for an investigation to determine why a bacteria was found in his corpse that, according to several experts and medical records, had no reason to be there, and whether Neruda died of the advanced prostate cancer he had been diagnosed with, or whether a secret agent of the dictatorship poisoned him with the bacteria.
«We have the political, moral, ethical and legal obligation of doing what an institution must do when issues of historical importance are left open to interpretation,» said the current president of the party, Lautaro Carmona.
Neruda died on September 23, 1973 at the Santa Maria Clinic in Santiago, one day before going into exile in Mexico, where he could have played the role of opposition to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet bringing the world’s attention to what was happening in Chile. EFE
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