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Pablo Neruda's Body to Be Exhumed

Intrigue

Was he poisoned after the 1973 Pinochet coup?

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Michel Lipchitz / AP Photo

Could the great poet Pablo Neruda have been murdered? A Chilean judge has ordered investigators to exhume the remains of the Nobel Prize winner to determine whether he was poisoned after the 1973 military coup that installed Augusto Pinochet. Neruda died 12 days after his friend Salvador Allende was overthrown as president. The official cause of death is complications from prostate cancer, but Neruda’s driver at the time, Manuel Araya, has long believed that the poet was poisoned. Chilean courts are at the moment investigating a series of alleged human rights abuse cases during Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Read it at Bloomberg