Ana María Luna Barrios searches murals of photos of people “disappeared” after the 1973 coup d’etat that ushered in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, looking for a face that might be her mother, from whom she was apparently taken after being born in captivity. Credit: Marjorie Apel/Creative Commons

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Dec 31 2014 (IPS)

The suspicion that babies of people detained and disappeared during Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship were stolen is growing stronger in Chile, a country that up to now has not paid much attention to the phenomenon.

“There has always been a suspicion that something similar to what happened in Argentina also occurred in Chile, and that many women who were pregnant when they were detained actually gave birth in detention centres,” a 70-year-old woman who asked to be identified simply as Carmen told IPS.

“No one dug into that issue much back then, because we were afraid, and nobody would have listened to us,” she added.

During the Sep. 11, 1973 coup, Carmen, a high school teacher who actively supported the left-wing Popular Unity government of socialist President Salvador Allende (1970-1973), was in a small town in southern Chile doing political work with a group of other young activists.

A few hours after Allende was overthrown by the coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, Carmen saw one of her fellow activists killed right next to her as they were protesting against army troops advancing on the small town. “You never get over that pain,” she said.

Despite the violence and insecurity, she made it back to Santiago and from there managed to flee into exile.“In this country things have moved forward slowly, very slowly at times, but with the certainty that there will be no backsliding. And this issue is not going to disappear, in case someone was hoping for that." -- Lorena Fríes

“I wasn’t detained or tortured, but many of my fellow activists were. A number of them gave birth to children, and no one knows if they are alive, while others fell pregnant as a result of being raped during torture,” she said.

According to the official investigation, 40,000 people were tortured during the 17-year military dictatorship, and 3,095 of them were killed, 1,000 of whom are still disappeared.

It has been confirmed that at least 10 women were pregnant when they were detained and disappeared. They were between the ages of 26 and 29, and were three to eight months pregnant.

In August, the moving images of Argentine activist Estela de Carlotto with Guido, her grandson, who was finally tracked down, made headlines around the world.

The discovery of the grandson of the president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, who was stolen during Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship, moved many people in Chile, who see progress being made across the border in healing the wounds left by human rights violations in a particularly sensitive area – the question of babies born to political prisoners and stolen.

Lorena Fríes, director of the National Institute of Human Rights, said there are well-founded suspicions that some children of political prisoners were taken by agents of the dictatorship, “but not in the same magnitude as in Argentina, where it formed part of the repressive policies.”

“I do not have the conviction that it was widespread, although there may have been cases,” she told IPS.

Human rights lawyer Alberto Espinoza has not yet handled any cases involving the theft of babies born in captivity.

“I know about pregnant women who were tortured and as a result may have lost their pregnancies, but I don’t have any information about those babies surviving,” he said.

But, Espinoza added, “I don’t rule out the possibility that it happened. Such extraordinarily inhumane and exceptionally shocking things happened during the military dictatorship that it can’t be ruled out that maybe some children survived and no one knows what happened to them.”

But for the first time, the suspicion that children were stolen by the dictatorship has been acknowledged to be well-substantiated.

That is especially true after the programme Informe Especial (Special Report) broadcast by the public station Televisión Nacional de Chile, with previously unheard accounts from women who were raped as part of the torture they suffered during the dictatorship, and who were told that their babies had died, in murky circumstances.

The report titled “the invisible children of the dictatorship” ended with an unprecedented appeal: “If you know or suspect that you were adopted and are between the ages of 35 and 40, contact the Interior Ministry’s Human Rights Programme.”

The information provided in the Special Report programme and the appeal put the spotlight on the official suspicion that children were stolen, but also on the children who were born as a result of the sexual violence that female political prisoners suffered in clandestine detention centres.

The programme, which aired Dec. 15, triggered a flurry of reactions on the social networks.

And the next day, Justice Minister José Antonio Gómez met with a group of former female political prisoners who were victims of sexual violence and promised to move ahead on a draft law that classifies torture and related sexual violence as specific crimes.

“It is certain that many people, principally women, have not given all of their testimony with respect to the politically-related sexual violence or sexual torture to which they were subjected during the dictatorship,” Fríes said.

“It has also been shown that it takes women a much longer time to report these kinds of situations. That means there is a pending issue here,” she said.

On the other hand, she added, “many years have gone by, and time is the main enemy of the possibility of seeing justice done.”

There is at least one concrete case of a baby girl who was born to a political prisoner. The name of the torture victim’s daughter, who is now an adult, was kept anonymous. Another young woman, Isabel Plaza, is the daughter of Rosa Lizana, who was kidnapped on the street when she was seven months pregnant, in 1975, and was held for a month before she was sent into exile.

Another special case is that of Ana María Luna Barrios, who since finding out she was adopted has been searching for her mother among the faces of the disappeared. She was abandoned in 1976 in the Military Hospital, where a nurse took her home and later adopted her.

She has taken her case to court, without results. But new investigations have found that a DINA – the dictatorship’s secret police – lieutenant Hernán Valle Zapata (now dead) registered her before she was abandoned, listing the mother as “failing to appear”, as he had done in the case of another baby girl.

Nieves Ayres, who now lives in New York, was held in Londres 38 and Tejas Verdes, two torture centres. She was systematically gang-raped, and in her account she describes that rats were inserted in her vagina, and she was subjected to sexual abuse by dogs.

She became pregnant, but suffered a miscarriage.

Espinoza noted that these cases are considered crimes against humanity, which means there is no statute of limitations and they can still be investigated, even though 24 years have passed since Chile’s return to democracy.

Fríes, for her part, said “these issues will probably be with us for a long time to come, which is why it is important to understand that the new times open up new doors with respect to what happened during the dictatorship and the need to bring these memories to light so that this never again happens in Chile.

“In this country things have moved forward slowly, very slowly at times, but with the certainty that there will be no backsliding. And this issue is not going to disappear, in case someone was hoping for that,” she concluded.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

Catalina Marileo and Luis Aillapán, a Mapuche husband and wife in front of their home in Puerto Saavedra, in the central Chilean region of La Araucanía. In 2002 they and other relatives protested against military personnel preparing to build a highway on their land. They were prosecuted and tried under the anti-terrorism law and ultimately acquitted. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Jun 24 2014 (IPS)

Chile has made a commitment to the international community to improve human rights in the country and erase the lingering shadow of the dictatorship on civil liberties.Making progress on women’s sexual and reproductive rights, reforming the controversial anti-terrorism law, guaranteeing the human rights of indigenous peoples and universal access to education and health are among the promises Chile made to the United Nations in June.

“We see that Chile is constantly taking steps toward the fulfilment of its obligations,” Amerigo Incalcaterra, the regional representative for South America of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told IPS.

On Jun. 19 the country underwent its Universal Periodic Review, a mechanism overseen by the U.N. Human Rights Council, for the second time in 2014.

At its appearance before the Council in Geneva, Switzerland, the Chilean government formally accepted 180 of the 185 recommendations made by the 84 member states, and turned down five.

Chile is one of the most conservative countries in Latin America, and is one of just six nations in the world where abortion is banned under any circumstances. Divorce was only approved in 2004, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community is still fighting for legal recognition of same-sex couples.

Education and health are deeply stratified, generating a spiral of inequality that this country of over 17 million people is clamouring to see reversed.

Native peoples like the Mapuche lack constitutional recognition in Chile and have engaged in confrontation with the authorities and powers-that-be for decades, seeking restitution of ancestral lands that were taken from them.

The Human Rights Council’s recommendations were addressed earlier this year by the rightwing government of President Sebastián Piñera (2010-2014), only weeks before he left office in March.

Piñera accepted 142 recommendations, rejected 13 and “took note of” another 30, which he said he could not commit to fulfilling because they depended on securing congressional approval.

“‘Taking note of’ these recommendations was a new departure in international law because recommendations must be accepted or rejected,” Paula Salvo, principal lawyer for the National Human Rights Institute (INDH) which took part in the session in Geneva, told IPS.

On May 30, the government of socialist President Michelle Bachelet sent a written “correction” to the earlier report, in which she accepted 180 recommendations and rejected five.

Among the five not accepted were two from the Vatican, on the rights of the human person from conception and the protection of traditional family identity, and another on Bolivia’s right to an outlet to the Pacific ocean.

According to Incalcaterra, Bachelet viewed many of the recommendations rejected by her predecessor as a part of her government programme, including the decriminalisation of therapeutic abortions in the case of foetal inviability, danger to the life of the mother and rape.

A bill to allow termination of pregnancy in these cases will be debated in parliament in the second half of this year.

Incalcaterra, whose regional headquarters are in Santiago, said that the U.N. recognises that abortion is “a complex, health-related issue”, while the Human Rights Council asks states to legislate for “at least these three cases” of abortion.

As well as legalising therapeutic abortions, the government promised to reform other laws inherited from the 1973-1990 Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, like the anti-terrorism law, which is enforced virtually exclusively against alleged offences by Mapuche indigenous people in their struggle to reclaim their traditional lands.

This law imposes high penalties, dual trials by civilian and military courts and “faceless” witnesses, among other anomalies. The government promised not to use the law against Mapuche people and to respect their human rights.

Another remnant of the dictatorship that still endures 24 years after the return of democracy is that any case involving military personnel, whether as victims or accused, can be tried in military courts. Under the promised reform, military personnel accused of common crimes will be tried in civilian courts and in future no civilian will ever be tried in a military court.

Hernando Silva, a researcher for Observatorio Ciudadano (Citizen Observatory), told IPS that his organisation is pleased that the state has accepted these recommendations, and is hoping that “they are implemented once and for all, and not just recognised.”

“It is not the first time that Chile commits itself to legislate about military courts or the anti-terrorism law” without anything happening to bring it about, he said.

“Bachelet herself  promised to stop enforcing the anti-terrorism law against the Mapuche people during her first term (2006-2010), but did not deliver,” he added.

Silva stressed that “this time, she needs to fully live up to her human rights obligations.”

Incalcaterra said that there is no legal compulsion to fulfil the Human Rights Council’s recommendations, but he pointed out that “all work done at the international level is based on good faith.”

“When you undergo this exercise, in dialogue with other states, and you agree to recognise the recommendations as appropriate, obviously you have to go back in four years’ time and report on what you have done,” he said.

The goal of the Universal Periodic Review, he said, is to promote the human rights of all people living in a country.

“We should see it as additional support to help states to establish public policies, improve their legislation where necessary, create institutions if they are lacking, devote resources, collect statistics and analyse them, organise campaigns, etcetera,” he said.

Chile’s fulfilment of its commitments will be reviewed in four years’ time.

The INDH has a role as the state supervisory institution and in its view there are urgent needs, such as the ratification of certain international human rights treaties.

A government human rights agency, a national plan and more human rights education are also needed.

For the many victims of the dictatorship who have not received reparations, the INDH believes a permanent assessment agency should be established for pending cases, and legal and social advice should be made available to torture victims.

INDH lawyer Salvo told IPS that “the government must create a permanent review mechanism for the U.N. recommendations,” because from now on “the challenge is internal.”

Pablo Neruda taping his poems in the U.S. Library of Congress in 1966. Credit: Public domain

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Nov 11 2013 (IPS)

Ongoing efforts to determine the causes of the deaths of high-profile Chileans – singer-songwriter Víctor Jara, former presidents Eduardo Frei Montalva and Salvador Allende, and Nobel Literate Prize-winner Pablo Neruda – indirectly bring visibility to thousands of other victims of Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship.

“A search for the historical truth is being driven by penal proceedings,” Luis Emilio Rojas, director of the master’s programme in penal law at the Alberto Hurtado University, told IPS.

“While the goal is to determine criminal responsibility, the reopening of legal proceedings indirectly helps to establish the occurrence of events that are milestones in the history of Chile,” he added.

Human rights lawyer Eduardo Contreras was the first to file, in conjunction with the Association of Relatives of Politically Executed Persons (AFEP), a lawsuit to establish the cause of the death of socialist president Salvador Allende during the military’s bombing of the La Moneda presidential palace in the Sep. 11, 1973 coup.

Today Contreras is demanding clarification of the death of poet Pablo Neruda, which occurred on Sep. 23, 1973 – just 12 days after his close friend Allende was overthrown.

Neruda’s remains were exhumed in April from the final resting place he shared with his last wife, singer and writer Matilde Urrutia (1912-1985), at their home in Isla Negra, 110 km west of Santiago.

On Friday Nov. 8, seven months after the exhumation, the Forensic Medical Service reported that international forensic experts ruled out the presence of toxic chemical substances that could have caused Neruda’s death.

Contreras noted, however, that the forensic exams by Chilean and foreign experts were just the first part of the investigation. He said that on Monday Nov. 11 “we will request that other laboratories take part in the investigation, in search of toxicological agents that are biological, not chemical, in nature, such as sarin gas, mustard gas, or bacteria.”

Judge Mario Carroza, who investigated whether third parties were involved in the death of the 1971 Nobel laureate, said it could not yet be established judicially whether Neruda was killed or died of cancer 40 years ago.

If the results of the forensic experts do not satisfy all of the concerned parties, “we will have to look for other alternatives,” he added.

Neruda, who was 69 years old and was being treated for prostate cancer when he died, had been a member of the Communist Party of Chile for 28 years.

At the time of his death, he was getting ready to go into exile in Mexico, where he would have been a prominent voice of opposition against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

In the days before his death, Neruda was demoralised when his three houses were raided by agents of the dictatorship.

His most beloved home, in Isla Negra, was looted by the troops, who overturned his seashell and butterfly collections and destroyed paintings, his incomplete writings, and the books, masks, wooden carvings, bottles, pipes and ocean-related memorabilia that filled the shelves of nearly every room.

The military had all of his staff fired, and only his wife and his driver and personal secretary, Manuel Araya, were allowed to stay.

Although Neruda was being treated for prostate cancer, Araya alleges that he was killed by an injection to his stomach given by someone posing as a doctor in the private Santa María clinic on the supposed orders of the dictatorship.

Nine years later, former president Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-1970) was killed in the same clinic, with a biological toxin, according to the legal investigation of his death.

Frei Montalva’s case shocked Chilean society, because it proved that the Pinochet regime had used toxins against its opponents. It also helped “raise awareness among some incredulous people,” AFEP president Alicia Lira told IPS.

But the perpetrators of abuses during the dictatorship still enjoy impunity, even though the regime’s human rights violations are now talked about openly, Lira said.

“There is impunity when many cases were closed by the military prosecutors office, which is both judge and plaintiff, and when more than 178 agents of the state who murdered and ‘disappeared’ people have not spent a single day in prison because of the application of ‘media prescripción’ [by which a sentence may be reduced when more than half the statute of limitation has elapsed] or because they were granted a suspended sentence,” she said.

Singer-songwriter and activist Víctor Jara was killed Sep. 15, 1973 while he was being held in Chile’s national stadium along with thousands of other opponents of the coup. His body showed signs of torture and was riddled with bullet wounds.

But it was not until 2008 that an investigation was launched into his death. The man accused of ordering his torture and firing the fatal shot, army Lieutenant Pedro Barrientos, is still at large, living a quiet life in the United States.

Contreras said it is a “moral duty” to investigate these deaths in the face of contradictory elements.

“Just as the law requires an inquiry into the death of a homeless man who dies of cold, which seems fair to me, why not investigate the death of a president? To me that is absolutely despicable,” he said, referring to Allende’s death.

For many years, doubts surrounded the death of Allende, who entrenched himself in the presidential palace along with a number of armed civilian supporters to resist the coup and the bombing of La Moneda. As a result of the lawsuit brought by Contreras, it was finally confirmed that he committed suicide.

In Neruda’s case there are also contradictions, which means “you are ethically and morally obligated to investigate, and if you don’t, you are a scoundrel,” Contreras said.

During the regime, 3,065 people were killed and/or forcibly disappeared, and 37,000 were held as political prisoners.

Some 1,300 human rights cases are making their way through the courts in Chile, involving crimes like extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances, torture, or illicit association committed between 1973 and 1990.

These cases and others that have been resolved cover 75 percent of the victims of killings or forced disappearance recognised by the state, but only a small portion of the cases of political prisoners who survived torture.

By IPS Correspondents
Sep 11 2013 (IPS)

The dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) from start to end systematically dismantled every vestige of “the Chilean path to socialism” that the government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973) had attempted to follow. But it also established political structures that Chilean democracy has not yet managed to eradicate. See the process in the timeline below:

Data: Marianela Jarroud based on documental sources. Design: Ignacio Castañares

Click to enlarge

By IPS Correspondents
Sep 11 2013 (IPS)

Free, public education is the main demand expressed today by Chilean society, especially the young. The issue is not that Chileans don’t study, or that school enrolment is low. The problem is the growing privatisation of the system, as shown by this graph, and how that has divided students into different categories, in terms of quality of education. It all began with the reforms ushered in by the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

Click to enlarge

Data: Marianela Jarroud based on official sources. Design: Ignacio Castañares

Chilean protester calling for a new constitution. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Sep 11 2013 (IPS)

Sept. 11, 1973 marked the start in Chile of a dictatorship that was synonymous with cruelty. But above and beyond the human rights violations, the reforms ushered in by the regime of General Augusto Pinochet continue to mark today’s Chile – a country of dynamic economic growth but a fragmented society.

Two of these reforms, in the spheres of politics and education, are among the targets of the massive student movement and sectors of the left, which are seeking to dismantle them and consider them key campaign issues for the November general elections.

“These are two essential areas, because they have an impact on the democratic character of Chilean society,” Pedro Milos, a history professor at the private Alberto Hurtado University, told IPS.

“The Chilean path to socialism” that the government of democratically elected Salvador Allende (1970-1973) attempted to follow before he was overthrown by Pinochet’s bloody coup, was systematically squelched by the dictator through a constitution that is still in effect today.

Ruling with an iron fist, Pinochet (1973-1990) introduced free-market policies, privatised and decentralised essential services that had been provided free of cost by the state, such as healthcare and education, and was a pioneer in putting pension funds in the hands of private companies.

At the time the educational reforms began to be adopted in 1981, 78 percent of primary and secondary school students were in the public education system, while the rest went to private schools.

But public education was whittled down, with schools transferred to the jurisdiction of municipal governments and the creation of state-subsidised private schools, with the subventions depending on the number of students they managed to attract.

The proportion of students in municipal schools had fallen to 57.8 percent by the return to democracy in 1990, and to 37.5 percent in 2012, due to the marked decline in the quality of education in these schools. That trend can be seen in the following table:

Click to enlarge

“The worst thing was the municipalisation of primary and middle schools,” Pilar Mella, a 57-year-old secretary, told IPS. “The municipalities with the most money dedicate more funds to education, giving rise to high levels of inequality.”

In 1971, during the Allende administration, the immense majority of students attended public schools. And when they completed 12 years of primary and secondary education, they went to the university free of charge and without the need for pre-college remedial courses.

Those were times of tuition-free public education of the same quality at all levels – a demand that is today expressed loud and clear on the streets of Chile by students who were not even born yet when the 1973 coup happened, and most of whom are not affiliated with any of the traditional political parties.

By the time the Pinochet regime had introduced all of its changes, tuition-free public universities were a thing of the past. And to enter university, students must now take admission exams – where poor students find themselves at a disadvantage due to the lower quality schools they have attended.

“What the dictatorship did was transform education into just another merchandise,” the president of the University of Chile Student Federation, Andrés Fielbaum, told IPS.

And the democratic governments that have ruled Chile since 1990 “continued to strengthen that model,” he said.

The centre-left Coalition of Parties for Democracy, which governed the country from 1990 to 2010, “invented shared financing, which means that each person buys the education they can afford, and created state-backed loans (to pay for university studies) which threw the banks into the banquet of education,” he said.

In modern societies, Milos argued, “educational systems are what make it possible to generate higher levels of equality and opportunities, and possibilities of social and political participation.”

It’s not a question of Chileans not studying. Coverage has grown, to 99.7 percent in primary education, 87.7 percent in secondary education, and 36.3 percent at university level.

But 44 percent of young people between the ages of 15 and 29 do not complete secondary school. And 25 percent of high school drop-outs neither work nor study – the fourth highest proportion among the countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the so-called rich countries’ club.

Moreover, in Chile, families directly finance over 70 percent of the cost of tertiary education, with the state covering just 22 percent – far below the OECD average of 68 percent public funding.

Under pressure from the student protests that have been raging since 2006, governments have introduced a number of changes in education, but without going to the core of the matter – inequality.

Paulina Jiménez, a 22-year-old political science student, says “today’s crisis originated in the political reforms of the dictatorship, especially the crisis of representation that has triggered, and has been expressed by, the student movement.”

Exactly seven years after the coup, on Sept. 11, 1980, Pinochet had voters approve a new constitution in a rigged plebiscite, with no voter lists.

The most emblematic aspect is the so-called “binomial” electoral system. Under that system, only two senators and two deputies are elected for each district. This favours the two large alliances – the Coalition of Parties for Democracy and the right-wing Coalition for Change, which is now in government.

The smaller forces, regardless of how many votes they earn, are excluded.

“That keeps the diversity of society and its social and political interests from being represented in parliament, the depository of popular sovereignty,” Milos argued.

The constitution was reformed many times since 1989, to eliminate the most irksome aspects, such as the lifetime and designated senators, including former commanders of the armed forces. But it continues to guide political life.

The dictatorship put hurdles in the way of major changes, such as the elimination of the binomial system, which require supermajorities in Congress that have never been achieved since 1990.

But the demands of the youth movement are gaining strength – a movement “that was born from having grown up in a country that we clearly do not like, that is unjust and segregated, but also from having grown up without the traumas and the dead that are the burden carried by many of our parents,” Fielbaum said.

“We aren’t afraid of politics or of dissent, because we know that it is the way we will build a different country,” he added. “And that is where our conviction for definitively eradicating Pinochet’s legacy is born.”

The Forensic Medical Service exhumes the remains of Pablo Neruda in Isla Negra. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Apr 9 2013 (IPS)

The investigation in Chile of the possibility that Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda was murdered by the 1973-1990 dictatorship is seen as a major stride forward in the search for truth and justice for human rights crimes that remain unpunished 40 years after the coup d’etat.

The remains of Neruda (1904-1973) were exhumed Monday Apr. 8 from his resting place next to his third wife, the singer Matilde Urrutia (1912-1985), at their seaside home in Isla Negra, 110 km west of Santiago.

Forensic experts will seek traces of biological elements related to the prostate cancer he was being treated for and to a possible poison that he may have been injected with.

The samples will be analysed in laboratories in Chile and perhaps abroad, as offers have come from Canada, Spain, the United States, Sweden and Switzerland. The process could take up to three months.

The exhumation was ordered by Judge Mario Carroza, who is investigating whether or not Neruda died of natural causes, as widely believed until now, on Sept. 23, 1973. He died just 12 days after the bloody coup by General Augusto Pinochet that overthrew democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende (1970-1973), a close friend of Neruda’s.

“It is extremely important for a judge to say that all cases of human rights violations must be clarified, including the death of Allende (during the coup), of former president Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-1970) or of Neruda, because that amounts to recognition that the justice system is in debt when it comes to the crimes committed in the dictatorship,” sociologist Manuel Antonio Garretón, winner of the National Humanities Prize 2007, told IPS.

Neruda died in the private Santa María clinic in Santiago four days after he was hospitalised for treatment of the cancer that had not kept him from living a normal life.

Some close to the poet suspected that the cause of death was an injection Neruda was given before he died, which they believe may have contained a poison – probably similar to what presumably killed Christian Democrat leader Frei Montalva in 1982, who at the time was one of the leading opposition figures to the Pinochet dictatorship.

When he died, Neruda, who was born with the name Neftalí Reyes, was 69 years old. He had been a member of the Communist Party of Chile for 28 years, and was preparing to go into exile in Mexico, where he would have been a strong voice of opposition to the regime.

The lawyer for the plaintiffs, Eduardo Contreras, told IPS that there were “strong suspicions” that Neruda was killed by agents of DINA, Pinochet’s secret police.

Contreras noted that around that time, Michael Townley, a U.S. citizen who was a double agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of his country and DINA, was active in Chile. He carried out several assassinations by poisoning with chemical substances.

Townley worked with Eugenio Berríos, the chemist who recreated sarin – a poisonous nerve gas invented by the Nazis – and worked with other lethal chemical weapons under the orders of DINA. Berríos was kidnapped and killed in Uruguay in the early 1990s by members of the Uruguayan and Chilean military.

In the days before his death, Neruda’s profound sensibility was overcome when his three houses were raided and looted by agents of the dictatorship.

His most beloved home, in Isla Negra, was looted by the troops, who overturned his seashell and butterfly collections and destroyed paintings, his incomplete writings, and the books, masks, wooden carvings, bottles, pipes and ocean-related memorabilia that filled the shelves of nearly every room.

The military had all of his staff fired, and only his wife and his driver and personal secretary, Manuel Araya, were allowed to stay.

Nearly 40 years later, Araya is at the centre of the lawsuit that the Communist Party filed in court.

“I want the forensic experts to put their hands on their hearts and tell the truth about Neruda,” Araya told IPS. “He didn’t even make a will, because he wasn’t actually dying.”

The sociologist, Carretón, said that above and beyond the question of whether Neruda was assassinated, it is important to investigate the abuses to which he was subjected before his death.

“Let’s suppose that there are no signs that third parties played a role in his death. Nevertheless, crimes were committed that have to do with the raids of his homes and actions that accelerated his death,” he said.

He added that if it is proven that Neruda was murdered, “the repercussions could be big, and many of those who still don’t believe that human rights violations were committed could realise that even the country’s top poet was killed, directly or indirectly.”

Furthermore, the case, involving Chile’s most famous poet, once again trains the spotlight on the human rights crimes that have gone unpunished, he added.

Some 3,000 people were killed or forcibly disappeared and nearly 30,000 were tortured during the 17-year dictatorship.

Neruda’s death certificate states that he died of cachexia, or loss of body mass, weakness and wasting caused by severe chronic illness. But he actually weighed over 100 kilos, according to Araya, and to Mexico’s ambassador to Chile, Gonzalo Martínez, who visited him in the clinic before his death.

A day after he died, the conservative newspaper El Mercurio published a report stating that Neruda had died “of a heart attack, a consequence of the shock suffered after he received a painkiller injection.”

Former judge Juan Guzmán, who was the first to prosecute Pinochet, said the exhumation of Neruda’s remains increased the odds that the homicide theory was correct.

“I imagine that in order to decide to do this, Carroza must have had strong presumptions that he died of causes that had nothing to do with his illness,” he told IPS.

“I used to be skeptical, but after all the investigations that I carried out, many of them involving medical questions, I’m not so sceptical anymore. And I believe it is necessary to investigate when there are indications that a murder may have been committed.”

If it is confirmed that Neruda was killed, “it would be appalling,” Guzmán said. “Pablo Neruda was a man of peace, who embodied peace through his poetry and his personal actions. So for me, more than a murder of a person, it would be the murder of everything he represented.”