Many Chileans have long suspected foul play in the death of the poet Pablo Neruda, who died 12 days after the 1973 coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Now, the government of Chile has said it is "highly probable" that those suspicions are correct.
The Interior Ministry released a statement on Thursday saying that "it is clearly possible and highly probable" that the death of Neruda "was caused by third-party intervention."
The government cautioned, however, that an official investigation into what it called "this painful case" was still continuing and that no conclusions about the cause of death had been reached.
Neruda was a literary giant, diplomat and lawmaker whose death has been one of many from the repressive Pinochet years that have hung over Chile.
He was a poet known primarily for his love poems, and he was a Communist who was close friends with Salvador Allende, Chile's socialist president, who committed suicide in the presidential palace in September 1973 rather than surrender to the leaders of the military coup.
Neruda planned to flee the country after the coup and speak out against the new regime from exile, but one day before he was supposed to leave, he was taken to a clinic in Santiago, the capital, where he died. He was 69.
The official cause of death was prostate cancer, but doubt about the government's version of events set in amid the authoritarianism of the Pinochet years.
Pinochet took power after the coup and ruled Chile until 1990. Thousands of people were killed, disappeared or tortured during his rule.
An official inquiry into Neruda's death was opened in 2011 after several witnesses, including his longtime driver, Manuel Araya, challenged the idea that he had died of natural causes. Araya said he believed that the military might have poisoned Neruda. A judge ordered the poet's body to be exhumed in 2013.
The government statement Thursday came in response to a report in the Spanish newspaper El País that included an Interior Ministry document on Neruda's death. That document, dated March 25, 2015, said in part, "The poet was injected with a pain killer that produced the cardiac arrest that would cause his death."
The report assigned no ulterior motive for the administration of that drug, but also noted a number of irregularities in the medical care that Neruda received that day. It said he had received the injection in his abdomen — as opposed to intravenously — which, it noted, was unusual in a medical center. It also said that it was not clear who had given him the injection or exactly what it had contained.
"What we do know," it continued, is that the state of Neruda's health "worsened rapidly after the injection and that his death occurred only six hours and thirty minutes afterward."
In its statement, the Interior Ministry said the document published by El País was part of a brief sent by the ministry's human rights program to Mario Carrozo, the judge leading the investigation into the poet's death.