Unravelling Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's mysterious death fifty years on

Did the Nobel laureate die a natural death or was it murder by poison due to his political leanings? New investigations point to the latter

One of the most enduring modern writers of poetry also died under one of the most mysterious circumstances in modern Chilean history. On September 23, 1973, poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda breathed his last at the Santa Maria Clinic in Santiago. He had been suffering from prostate cancer and the cause of death at that time was said to be heart collapse.

On Tuesday, nearly fifty years after Neruda passed away, his nephew Rodolfo Reyes told Spanish news agency EFE that the forensic tests had found that the poet had been poisoned, confirming decades of suspicions that he was murdered.

Neruda’s