2023-06-22 08:08:00
Manuel Araya, Pablo Neruda’s former driver and whose testimony was decisive in supporting the thesis that the Nobel Prize for Literature was assassinated in 1973, died at the age of 77 in the Chilean city of San Antonio.
“Manuel Araya was key with his testimony, his management and his courage so that the elements that gave rise to the complaint for the death of the poet that the Party presented along with his family existed,” the Communist Party of Chile said on Wednesday in a statement.
Considered a trusted man of Neruda, he was one of the first voices to question the official version that the Chilean poet died on September 23, 1973 from prostate cancer.
The thesis put forward by Araya in 2011, and which has been supported by a nephew of Neruda and by the Communist Party -where the poet was a member-, is that the author of “Canto General” was poisoned a few days following the coup d’état of 11 September 1973, by agents of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.
“Neruda was a danger to Pinochet. Remember the Spanish war and the refugees he took with him in Winnipeg. Pinochet was not interested in (Neruda) leaving the country for any reason,” Araya said last February to insist on the version of the murder.
However, Until now justice has not validated that theory. A panel of experts has already delivered its conclusions to the judge in charge of the case of Neruda’s death, Paola Plaza, who had to analyze them.
At the moment there is no decisive scientific evidence to support the thesis of the murder.
The ‘Clostridium botulinum’ bacterium “was there (in Neruda’s body) at the time of his death, but we still don’t know why. We just know it shouldn’t be there,” Hendrik and Debi Poinar of McMaster University (Canada) and members of the scientific panel said at the time.
© Agence France-Presse
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