won’t go back to see.
Nearly twenty years after Neruda’s death, the wish he had expressed fifty years earlier in that Canto General poem was finally fulfilled. Due to legal and administrative hurdles, though, it took over a year after Isla Negra was opened for Neruda to make his final homecoming. One impediment was that Chile has strict sanitary laws regarding burials; even cemeteries have to pass strict requisites. A legal ruling had to be made in order to authorize an exception to allow the burial of a body on private land. In 1991, Law Number 19.072 was passed: “In recognition of his literary work and so that his work receives fair recognition of the present generations and serves as an example to future generations,” it awarded “the right for his mortal remains and those of his wife, Matilde Urrutia Cerda, to rest in the building that today houses the Pablo Neruda Museum.”
On December 12, 1991, three years after the “no” vote won, Neruda’s and Matilde’s coffins were taken out of the Santiago cemetery. Before their procession to Isla Negra, they were brought to the beautiful hall of honor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The coffins were draped in Chilean flags, as if lying in state. A crowd surrounded them, though the Chilean Right was notably absent. Dignitaries spoke; a telegram from Rafael Alberti was read.
Neruda’s old compañero Volodia Teitelboim, now the president of the Communist Party, gave the closing remarks. The return of Neruda to Isla Negra, he announced, represented “the victory of poetry against wind and tide, against Pinochet and the anti-Chile, anti-culture dominion. It’s a great achievement for all of us who believe in human rights.”
Dr. Francisco Velasco, who had shared the La Sebastiana house with his dear friend Neruda, missed the poet’s funeral following the coup because he had been arrested and imprisoned on one of the regime’s boats, anchored in Valparaíso’s harbor. But he was present for this second funeral. “It was very moving, very moving . . . We were there with a ton of people. Down at the beach there were more people—because they didn’t all fit up here—so all these people were on the beach. And Pablo arrives and they ring the bell: ‘Don Pablo has arrived,’ they were saying, and then it felt like he was going to arrive alive. Whenever we went to see him the bell sounded and [someone from the house] would yell, ‘Don Pablo has arrived.’ The man who brought him said the same, ‘Don Pablo has arrived.’ And then they buried him there.”
* * *
Twenty-one years later, in April 2013, Neruda’s body was brought back out of Isla Negra’s humid soil. Someone claimed that the poet had been poisoned by the Pinochet regime, supposedly to prevent him from leaving for Mexico and using his exile to become a leading voice of the resistance. With this assertion, the circumstances surrounding his death suddenly took on a life of their own in the press, while they were discussed with furious passion by many on both sides of the argument.
There has never been enough factual evidence to convincingly show that the possibility of Neruda’s murder is anything more than just that, a possibility. The theory is backed only by presumptions. Still, the degree to which the story was covered and sensationalized around the world warrants a review of the phenomenon’s history.
In December 1972, Manuel Araya, a young member of the Communist Party, was hired to be Neruda’s new chauffeur. Skip to nearly a year later, when Neruda, in the hospital, finally agreed to take Mexico’s offer of asylum (and stay at its National Cancer Institute, as his cancer was so severe). Neruda asked Araya and Matilde to go to Isla Negra and get some of his belongings to take with them. Upon their return, Araya says, “Neruda was feverish and flushed. He said they had stuck him in the gut.” There was a red mark on his belly. That injection was, Araya maintains, the “evil ordered by the dictator Pinochet.” Neruda died that night, September 23.
Pinochet’s rule ended in 1989. For whatever reason, it wasn’t until 2004—Neruda’s centennial—that Araya told his story assertively enough that his claim was published, though only in his tiny hometown newspaper. It received little coverage and was quickly dismissed. Yet, in 2011, one of Araya’s Communist compañeros enticed a major left-wing Mexican newsmagazine, Proceso, to hear him out. This time, it became a big deal. The headline “Neruda Was Assassinated,” followed by Araya’s testimony, quickly captured the world’s imagination. The story had a romantic ring: Pablo Neruda, the heroic and globally beloved poet, had purportedly been murdered because he was the people’s poet, the poet of love, the poet of human dignity.
Many, from all parts, believed that Neruda might have been poisoned, but the story relied on inconclusive narratives. With everybody excited, the Chilean Communist Party; Rodolfo Reyes, the son of Neruda’s half brother; and even the Interior Ministry’s Human Rights Program spearheaded a formal complaint. There were assumptions, some discussed below, that could point to the possibility of a homicide. A judge opened a formal investigation.*
Those supporting the assassination theory were emboldened by discoveries in the case of former president Eduardo Frei’s death following a 1982 hernia operation, performed in the same hospital where Neruda had been. Frei had supported the coup but, like other members of his Christian Democratic Party, had turned against Pinochet when the dictator’s absolute nature and intentions became clear. He had begun to influentially organize resistance to the dictatorship. His daughter insisted that he could not have died of natural causes. Though her claims were initially met with skepticism, in 2009, six members of the regime’s intelligence unit were arrested for lethally mixing thallium and mustard gas into his medication. However, it has been found and reported on that the regime did not begin to carry out such lethal injections until 1976, ruling out the possibility that such an injection was used on Neruda just after Pinochet took
