SANTIAGO — Manuel Araya, who was the driver of Chilean Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda and who for decades claimed that the poet was poisoned before going into exile, died of an aneurysm, it was reported Wednesday.
Araya always questioned the official version that Neruda’s death on September 23, 1973 -12 days after the military coup- was due to complications from metastatic prostate cancer.
The driver died the day before, at the age of 77, from an aneurysm that kept him hospitalized after suffering cardiovascular problems on June 12, the Communist Party, in which Neruda was a member of his entire life, reported on Wednesday.
Araya always affirmed that Neruda was poisoned while he was hospitalized in a private clinic.
However, he was only heard by the Communist Party in 2011 after his statements on the subject were published by a Mexican media outlet, as he reiterated to The Associated Press last February.
Neruda lived in a seaside resort on the Chilean coast, whose residence was surrounded by the military after the uprising.
Araya and the poet’s wife, Matilde Urrutia, hospitalized him in a health clinic in the Chilean capital to be closer to the international airport, where he would board a plane that would take him into exile in Mexico. The trip was scheduled for the day after his death.
Ten years ago the body of the poet was exhumed.
In addition, he recalled that while he and Urrutia were running errands outside of Santiago, Neruda called them to tell them that they had injected him and that he felt bad. He died hours later.
An international group of geneticists delivered a report last February with its conclusions on the causes of the poet’s death to Judge Paola Plaza, who kept the results confidential because “it is an investigation that is in the summary stage” and that has been extended for 12 years.
Rodolfo Reyes, Neruda’s nephew, told the press that because he was a plaintiff in the judicial process, he had access to the report and that it corroborates that in the writer’s body there was “a large amount of Clostridium botulinum,” a toxin that can generate problems in the human organism, such as difficulties in breathing, swallowing or speaking and paralysis, among other symptoms, and even death.
