Poisonous bacteria was in Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's blood stream when he died, McMaster scientists find

A poisonous bacteria was present in famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's body when he died half a century ago, McMaster University scientists have found.

The recent discovery is consistent with allegations that the Nobel Prize-winning Neruda, who was also a Communist Party politician, was assassinated days after a military coup overthrew Chile's socialist government in 1973.

Since 2016, evolutionary geneticists and forensic experts from McMaster in Hamilton and the University of Copenhagen have been analyzing bone and tooth samples to rule out other possible causes of death and look for deadly pathogens.

The scientists have been in Chile over the past two weeks, presenting their findings to a tribunal. The hearing ended Wednesday.

McMaster researcher Debi Poinar told The Current's Matt Galloway Thursday that while the researchers can definitively say the botulism-causing bacteria Clostridium botulinum was in Neruda's blood stream when he died, they can't say for certain it's what killed him.

"But on the other hand, why is it there?" Poinar said. "It's not a natural organism that should be present in your body for any other reason."

In the days after the Sept. 11 coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Neruda, 69, planned to go into exile where he'd be an influential critic of the dictatorship. A day before his departure, he was taken by ambulance to a Santiago clinic where he officially died on Sept. 23 from natural causes.

'He was such a big poet'

Hamilton poet Constanza Duran was born in Chile and was 17 when the coup took place. She told CBC Hamilton that soldiers raided her family's home, destroying all their belongings. Family members and friends were arrested and tortured. Many never returned.

She described Neruda as "dear to everybody at that time."

"He was such a big poet, an amazing poet," Duran said. "He was our poet."

When he died, it was a time of grief and chaos with "people dying around us," she said.

"Thinking he was murdered wasn't too far off."

More than 40,000 people were imprisoned, tortured or slain throughout the bloody dictatorship that ended in 1990.

Suspicions that the dictatorship was behind Neruda's death swirled into the 21st century, leading to his body being exhumed in 2013 and tibia, femur and teeth samples extracted for further investigations.

In recent years, Neruda has come under increased scrutiny for admitting to raping a cleaning woman, which he wrote about in his memoir published after his death.

The Hamilton and Copenhagen scientists previously determined Neruda didn't die of prostate cancer, which he was being treated for at the time of his death. They also ruled out malnutrition before scanning for different types of bacteria that had been used as biological weapons.

As for what Neruda may have experienced if he had died of botulism, Poinar said he would've suffered paralysis or septicemia, a serious blood infection.

Duran, the poet, fled Chile in 1975 and settled in Canada in 1988. She said the new findings "bring a lot of grief" and if he was murdered it was a "horrible act of cruelty."