Here's a news story about the possible murder of Pablo Neruda, by the Chilean military dictatorship, in 1973. Possible is the key word, of course. I worked in Chile for three years or more, mostly in Santiago, got to visit his (restored) Santiago house as well as both his coastal homes in Isla Negra and Valparaiso. All beautifully quirky places filled with the most curious things that he could find from his travels around the world.
On no occasion during that three years or so did any Chilean ever discuss with me that Neruda might have been poisoned rather than succumbed to cancer. I knew this history, of course, but the people I knew and worked with never discussed it; and I therefore never felt it appropriate to ask their opinions.
I guess that's how open secrets work in some societies - what everybody believes but nobody will say.
On the other hand, everybody I knew and worked with in Chile was happy to talk about their national poet, the Nobel Prize winner, as they should have been. Even those people who didn't read poetry, or even care to read it. A hero is a hero. I thought then and still think today that even entertaining the idea that their Laureate had been murdered by the State was too much to bear.
While I'm on the subject, did you know that Neruda isn't the only Chilean poet to win the Nobel in Literature? Gabriela Mistral won that honor long before. In fact, she was the first Latin American writer to win in the literature category. Like Neruda, she was more than a poet. Like him, she was a diplomat and an educator. That's one of the things I've always loved about Latin American writers; they serve their countries directly.
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