Digging up Neruda

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is the latest famous figure to be exhumed in order to test a hypothesis. Neruda died 40 years ago, officially from prostate cancer. But many people have long asserted that his actual cause of death was poisoning, due to his outspoken stance against the junta.

Neruda died less than two weeks after the dictator General Pinochet overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende and took control of Chile. Both Allende and outspoken folk singer Victor Jara were assassinated by the junta in the week prior to Neruda's death. Conspiracy theorists got a boost in 2011 when Neruda's former driver came forward to claim that the night before he died, Neruda told his driver that he has been given a "harmful injection by a doctor."

It's certainly not beyond the realm of reason to suspect Augusto Pinochet of having Neruda assassinated. During his dictatorial rule from 1973 to 1990, his regime killed between 1,200-3,200 people, interned up to 80,000 in prison camps, and tortured up to 30,000 people including women and children. Chileans cheered when Pinochet finally died in 2006 from a heart attack.

Regardless of whether Neruda's death is finally proven or exonerated, the fact of his death still remains. The legendary Nobel prize-winning poet left behind a legacy of heartbreaking and sensuous poems, as well as a vibrant history of political protest. Although Neruda's fervent belief in communism, coupled with the difficulty in translating his poems properly, have made Neruda a lesser-known poet in America, his 1924 book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair continues to sell fairly well.

It's understandable why Neruda's passionate followers would want to exhume his remains and solve the mystery of his death once and for all. But no less than the Pablo Neruda Foundation (which controls Neruda's literary estate) has attempted to block the exhumation, in the belief that we should let the dead stay dead, and remember their works instead.

Image courtesy Flickr/Bruno Amarai