by the El Reportero’s news services
An injection to the stomach ended the life of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda on Sept. 23, 1973, says completely convinced his driver and personal assistant Manuel Araya.
In an interview with Prensa Latina, Araya insisted on the idea that Neruda, who was hospitalized in the Santa María clinic, was in such a stable condition that he sent him and his wife Matilde Urrutia to look for some books in Isla Negra.
The interview fuels the theory that Araya has incessantly repeated along the years: the Literature Nobel Prize was murdered.
One of the author’s three residences is located in Isla Negra. His mortal remains should lie there, according to his own will, but now they have remained somewhere else.
Funding from the Chilean Government to transfer the remains to Europe is still on hold. European scientists will carry out new tests to determine his real cause of death.
Officially, Neruda died there on Sept. 23 from natural causes. But suspicions that the dictatorship had a hand in the death have lingered long after Chile returned to democracy in 1990.
The Chilean Interior Ministry released a statement last Thursday amid press reports that Neruda might not have died of cancer.
For the first time, an official document stated that it was “clearly possible and highly probable that a third party” was responsible for Neruda’s death.
Araya completes the story, saying that a young doctor had told him to leave Neruda and go fetch a specific medicine but he refused. However, the doctor gave him a prescription and forced him to go.
He said it was strange that in such an expensive clinic, he had to go looking for a medicine himself.
Afterwards, he was arrested, tortured and shot by Pinochet’s police. Thanks to Cardinal Silva Enríquez’s intervention I was saved, he remembered.
That is when I heard the terrible news. Neruda had died the previous night at 10:30 p.m. I was so distressed; I told the military to kill me once and for all.
Neruda had died and that was all it mattered to his driver and assistant.
Exhibitions will show links between European and Mexican art
The link between European and Mexican art will be displayed at the exhibition Los Modernos, open from today until April 3 at the National Art Museum in this capital.
Rafael Tovar y de Teresa, head of the National Council for Culture and Arts (Conaculta), said that the works of the exhibition, with nine thematic clusters, will allow appreciating the dialogue between relevant creators.
Among the artists included in the exhibition he mentioned Pablo Picasso, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Angel Zarraga, Henri Matisse and Francis Bacon.
He noted that this is part of the great exhibition that Conaculta has brought to Mexico and today cover a wide circuit in the most important museums in the country.
He said the central themes titled Landscape, Nude, Portrait, Surrealism, Light and Color, Line, Space and Abstraction, will show how during the early twentieth century Mexican art was at the forefront.
Meanwhile, Maria Cristina Garcia, general director of the National Institute of Fine Arts, said this exhibition gives continuity to a cultural project that seeks to exhibit in Mexico the best of international art.
She praised that the exhibition will also travel to Guadalajara, capital of Jalisco, and to the city of Lyon, France.
