Quote:
But have you been to Valparaiso?
Yes Sir, I even went to visit Neruda's house there.
Chile seeking answers in death of poet
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/wo ... -poet-ner/
The body of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda is being exhumed in an effort to clear up four decades of suspicion about how he died in the days after Chile's military coup.
A team of investigators is to begin digging on Sunday at Isla Negra, a rocky outcrop on the Pacific Coast where Neruda lived.
But forensic experts say there's little hope the exhumation will answer the question of whether one of the great poets of the 20th century died of natural causes as was recorded, or if he was poisoned by the military dictatorship as his driver and some others believe.
Judge Mario Carroza has approved a request by Chile's Communist Party for the disinterment but not the use of independent experts.
Neruda, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1971, was best known for his verses of romantic eroticism, especially the collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
He was also a leftist politician and diplomat and close friend of socialist President Santiago Allende, who committed suicide rather than surrender to troops during the September 11, 1973, coup led by General Augusto Pinochet.
Neruda, 69 and suffering from prostate cancer, was said to be traumatised by the coup and the persecution and killing of his friends.
He planned to go into exile, where he would have been an influential voice against the dictatorship but a day before he planned to leave, was taken by ambulance to the Santa Maria clinic, where he was being treated for cancer and other ailments.
Officially, Neruda died there on September 23 from natural causes.
However, suspicions the dictatorship had a hand in the death have lingered long.
Neruda's remains have been buried for years in soil that receives intense coastal humidity.
Once they are exhumed, investigators will then have to work with what experts say is outdated technology and equipment.
"No big or false hope should be made about the exhumation and the analysis of the remains of Neruda yielding a cause of death" said Dr Luis Ravanal, a forensic specialist.
Chile's legal medicine laboratory "lacks basic equipment for the analysis of toxics and drugs that even the most modest labs own," he said.
"Technically there's a big limitation; there is no sophisticated equipment to detect other substances, so they'll invariably have to seek other labs."
Ravanal also said Chile lacks expertise in analysing bone remains.
Chilean Communist Party lawyer Eduardo Contreras, who is overseeing the exhumation, said he was disappointed outside experts were not allowed.
