Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady

Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady

by Jon Lee Anderson

The New Yorker - April 10, 2013

It’s curious, historically speaking, that Margaret Thatcher died on the same day that forensic specialists, in Chile, exhumed the remains of the late, great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The author of the epic “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” and the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature, Neruda died at the age of sixty-nine, supposedly of prostate cancer, just twelve days after the violent September 11, 1973, military coup launched by army chief Augusto Pinochet against the country’s elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende. Warplanes had strafed the Presidential palace, and Allende had bravely held out, but committed suicide with a rifle given to him by Cuba’s President Fidel Castro as Pinochet’s goons stormed into the Presidential palace. Neruda was a close friend and supporter of Allende’s; he was ill, but in the midst of planning to leave the country for Mexico, where he had been invited to go into exile. When he was on his deathbed in a clinic, his home had been broken into by soldiers and trashed.

At his funeral, a large crowd of mourners marched through the streets of Santiago—a grim city that was otherwise empty except for military vehicles. At his gravesite, in one of the only known acts of public defiance in the wake of the coup, the mourners sang the “Internationale” and saluted Neruda and also Allende. As they did, the regime’s men were going around the city, burning the books of authors it didn’t like, while hunting down those it could find to torture or kill.
A couple of years ago, Neruda’s former driver came forth to express his suspicion that Neruda had been poisoned, saying that he’d heard from the poet that doctors gave him an injection and that, immediately afterward, Neruda’s condition had worsened drastically. There are other tidbits of evidence that bolster his theory, but nothing conclusive. Forensic science, in the end, may provide the answer to a nagging historic question.

Why bring Maggie Thatcher into it? In a tribute Monday, President Barack Obama said she had been “one of the great champions of freedom and liberty.” Actually, she hadn’t. Thatcher was a fierce Cold Warrior, and when it came to Chile never mustered quite the appropriate amount of compassion for the people Pinochet killed in the name of anti-Communism. She preferred talking about his much-vaunted “Chilean economic miracle.”

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