The Assassination of Pablo Neruda

[Peter Lemkin]

N.B. I had the unique honor of meeting, shaking hands with and talking to Pablo Neruda in Santiago on the opening night of an 'anti-Yankee Imperialism' play (Fulgor y Muerte de Joaquín Murieta) by him, before the USA decided to overthrow his country and destroy it [and him - and SO many others]!
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The CIA's Chile Coup: Suspicions Rise in Poet Pablo Neruda's Death (AP)
22nd January 2012

" … The death certificate issued at the clinic listed the cause of death as cachexia, or extreme malnutrition and weight loss that left him unable to carry out minimal activities. But at the moment of his death, Neruda weighed more than 220 pounds (100 kilograms) … Everything indicates that it was a heart attack (that caused his death). … What caused the attack? The injection… If you read the literature on Dipirona you are going to find that it is lethal when given in excess. … ""

By EVA VERGARA, Associated Press

ISLA NEGRA, Chile (AP) The suspicions have lingered for decades.

Pablo Neruda, Chile's Nobel Prize-winning poet, would have been a powerful voice in exile against the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. But that all changed just 24 hours before Neruda was to flee the country in the chaos following the 1973 military coup.

He was 69 years old and suffering from prostate cancer when he died, exactly 12 days after the brutal coup that ended the life of his close friend, socialist President Salvador Allende.

The official version was that he died of natural causes brought on by the trauma of witnessing the coup and the lethal persecution of many of his
friends.

Some Chileans have questioned that official telling of Neruda's death and instead suspected foul play at the hands of Pinochet's regime. Those doubts could get a public airing as Chile's Communist Party asks that Neruda's body be exhumed for testing to address long-simmering suspicions that the poet was poisoned.

The judge investigating his death could rule at any moment that the exhumation go forward.

Communist Party lawyer Eduardo Contreras said he believes the poet was murdered, and he is supported by Manuel Araya, who was Neruda's driver, bodyguard and assistant in the year leading up to his death.

While Neruda's widow and his own foundation have rejected the theory, its resurgence nearly 40 years later reflects the suspicions haunting this nation of 17 million that the full story behind the coup and the dictatorship remains untold.

Araya has long contended that a doctor not Neruda's regular one gave him a fatal injection at the Santa Maria clinic or ordered somebody to do so. Talking to The Associated Press, Araya described the day of Neruda's death at the clinic, where the poet was being treated for his cancer, phlebitis and a hip problem. Araya had accompanied him as his bodyguard to protect him ahead of his departure from Chile. He himself wasn't there,and says the story was told to him by a nurse whose name he has forgotten.

"Coincidentally," Araya said in sarcastic manner, Dr. Sergio Draper "was passing by in the hallway when a nurse called to him and said that Neruda was in a lot of pain, and this doctor, very considerately, goes and gives him a Dipirona (analgesic), and the Dipirona… killed him."

Adding to the conspiracy theories, it was at the same Santa Maria clinic where another prominent Pinochet critic, former President Eduardo Frei, was allegedly poisoned while recovering from hernia surgery in 1982. A judge in Chile has accused four doctors and two of the dictator's agents in Frei's death. The case is ongoing, and Frei's body has been exhumed. One of the doctors questioned in the case, though not accused: Sergio Draper.

The AP was unable to reach the doctor for comment, after contacting the clinic where Neruda was treated and one of Chile's main medical schools.

However, in an interview published in the Argentine newspaper Clarin in September, Draper strongly denied the allegation. he said he was only following the instructions of Neruda's physician, Vargas Salazar, to help relieve the patient's pain by giving him what he remembers was the drug Dipirona.

"I ordered that he be given an injection prescribed by his physician," Draper said. "I was nothing more than a messenger. It's outrageous that we are constantly under suspicion."

Neruda and Allende symbolized a turbulent, confrontational era in Chilean history, and their deaths following the Sept. 11, 1973 coup have long been shrouded by suspicion. Authorities recently exhumed Allende's body and confirmed that the former president committed suicide rather than be captured as troops moved in on the presidential palace.

Pinochet's dictatorship lasted from 1973 to 1990, and left 3,095 opponents of the military regime dead or missing, according to recent government statistics. There were 37,000 political prisoners. Neruda's fame as a poet and dissident was posthumously heightened by "Il Postino," or "The Postman," a semi-fictional 1994 film about his exile that won several Oscar nominations. He is buried on the Isla Negra estate where he lived.

Veteran forensic expert Dr. Luis Ravanal said it could be difficult to find traces of toxic substances that would confirm Neruda's poisoning.

"It is one thing is to detect a substance, another to demonstrate that it is there in sufficient quantities to kill him," he told the AP. "It is difficult to
determine if it is a lethal or therapeutic dosage."

But Contreras says an exhumation is needed. He said medical records and Araya's account proved to him that Neruda's cancer was under control at the time of his death. No autopsy was performed because foul play was not suspected thatnight. Only later did the suspicions arise.

"One thing is clear: Neruda didn't die of cancer," Contreras said.

Contreras said the death certificate issued at the clinic listed the cause of death as cachexia, or extreme malnutrition and weight loss that left him unable to carry out minimal activities. But at the moment of his death, Neruda weighed more than 220 pounds (100 kilograms), according to Araya and Mexico's ambassador to Chile at the time of the coup, Gonzalo Martinez Corbala.

Martinez told the AP from Mexico City that he found no change in Neruda between visits to him before and after the coup.

Martinez said that before hearing the driver's statements he had suspected nothing unnatural about Neruda's death. "Now I have doubts," he said.

The Pablo Neruda Foundation, which manages his estate, author rights and house/museum, rejects the claims of his driver.

"It doesn't seem reasonable to build a new version of the death of the poet based only on the opinions of his driver," the foundation said in a statement, contending that Araya does not present any credible evidence to support his claims.

"The Sept. 11, 1973 coup, the death of his friend, President Salvador Allende, and the persecution launched against others of his friends, caused his health to deteriorate to the point that … he had to be transferred in an emergency from his Isla Negra home to the Santa Maria Clinic on September 19," where he died of natural causes, said the foundation in a statement.

Araya says he went at least eight times to Communist Party directors to tell his story, but they paid no attention.

Contreras explained. "We were in a dictatorship; we weren't at the time interested in information different from that given by Matilde," he said,
referring to Neruda's widow, Matilde Urrutia, who supported the foundation's conclusion until her death.

Araya, refuses to speak to Chilean media, finally took his story to the respected Mexican investigative magazine Proceso, and the May 2011 article went viral.

That persuaded the party to pay attention.

"Everything indicates that it was a heart attack (that caused his death)," Contreras said. "What caused the attack? The injection… If you read the
literature on Dipirona you are going to find that it is lethal when given in excess."

The Chilean newspaper El Mercurio, which backed the dictatorship at the time, reported in its Sept. 24, 1973, edition that Neruda had died in a way similar to what Araya described. It said that the poet died "of a heart attack … a consequence of a shock. After receiving an injection of a sedative, his condition deteriorated" and he entered a pre-coma state and died.

Draper was one of several doctors called to testify in the possible killing of former President Frei. Frei was recovering from a hernia operation in the Santa Maria clinic when his health suddenly deteriorated and he died in January 1982. Six people have been accused of poisoning him, according to the judicial file.

Neruda's case since May has been in the hands of Judge Mario Carroza, who also investigated the death of Allende. Advised by a team of international forensic experts, he concluded that Allende had committed suicide.

He is also trying to determine how 725 opponents of the dictatorship died.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/arti...eaf31a04ee

[Peter Lemkin]

Harold Pinter - Nobel Lecture
http://www.onealcompton.com/index.php?modulo=pinter

Harold Pinter - Nobel Lecture

Art, Truth & Politics

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States ' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America 's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death the same thing and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America 's view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua . I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua . My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: 'But in this case innocent people were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?'

Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,' he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador .

I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua . There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala . The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia , USA . That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.

But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia , Greece , Uruguay , Brazil , Paraguay , Haiti , Turkey , the Philippines , Guatemala , El Salvador , and, of course, Chile . The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America . It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US .

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain .

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading as a last resort all other justifications having failed to justify themselves as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things':

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!*

Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq . I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden , of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China ? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.

'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'

A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called 'Death'.

Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.

[Magda Hassan]

Exhumation of Pablo Neruda's remains set for 8 April

Pablo Neruda, seen here on a visit to the BBC's Latin American service in 1965, was fiercely critical of the military


A court in Chile has set a date for the exhumation of the remains of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda, as part of an inquest into his death.
International experts will begin their examinations on 8 April to determine whether the poet was poisoned in 1973.
The poet and left-wing activist died 12 days after a military coup replaced the socialist President Salvador Allende with General Augusto Pinochet.
The poet's family maintains that he died at 69 of advanced prostate cancer.
In 2011, Chile started investigating allegations by his former driver, Manuel Araya Osorio, that the poet had been poisoned.
Experts from Argentina and Spain will reportedly join observers from the International Red Cross on the exhumation works.
Spanish expert Francisco Etxeberria has told local media that he will be travelling to Chile.
'Shed light' "Then we will take the tests that could shed light on the case," Mr Etxeberria told Diario Vasco. "It's been 40 years, but we have the means to shed much light."
Mr Neruda's body is buried next to his wife Matilde Urrutia in Isla Negra, 120km (70 miles) west of the capital Santiago.
Neruda was a Communist and a friend of President Allende.
But the foundation that guards his legacy says it believes Pablo Neruda died of cancer.
Neruda was a fierce critic of the military coup, which he saw as a betrayal of his country.
His death is not the only one from that period to be re-examined.
In December 2011, after the remains of President Allende were exhumed, it was confirmed that he committed suicide, and was not killed by soldiers who stormed the presidential palace during the coup, as some had argued.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-21763870

[Magda Hassan]

In the inquiry into the death of Neruda currently underway they are looking for a 'Doctor Price' as the man who gave him the injection. He is blue eyed has a beard and bares an uncanny resemblance to Michael Townley.

[Magda Hassan]

And the Pinochet minions did it to others as well:

Suspects arrested for 1981 poisoning of Chilean ex-president

DECEMBER 10, 2009

Eduardo Frei

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |

A Chilean judge this week charged several people connected with the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, of complicity in the 1981 murder by poisoning of former Chilean President Eduardo Frei Montalva. With the help of the CIA, Frei, a conservative centrist, became Chile's elected leader from 1964 to 1970. In 1973, he supported the Augusto Pinochet junta movement against Chile's elected President, Salvador Allende, but soon became disillusioned and opposed the military regime's widespread human rights abuses. In November 1981, Frei checked into Santiago's Santa Maria Clinic for a routine hernia operation. It was there, according to the court indictment, that several doctors connected with the Pinochet junta systematically poisoned the former Chilean President with thallium and small doses of mustard gas, which eventually killed him. The indictments represent a significant breakthrough in the case, which has tormented Chilean political life for nearly three decades. In 2001, Frei's daughter, Carmen Frei, told the Chilean Senate that the pro-Pinochet doctors injected her father not with thallium or mustard gas, but with bacteria produced by Eugenio Berrios, a notorious biochemist with Nazi sympathies, who worked for Chile's National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) under Pinochet.

[Peter Lemkin]

In the inquiry into the death of Neruda currently underway they are looking for a 'Doctor Price' as the man who gave him the injection. He is blue eyed has a beard and bares an uncanny resemblance to Michael Townley.

Is Townley still alive?...I think he may well be. CIA 'asset' for our 'warm and fuzzy' coups, assassinations and government overthrows.

[Magda Hassan]

In the inquiry into the death of Neruda currently underway they are looking for a 'Doctor Price' as the man who gave him the injection. He is blue eyed has a beard and bares an uncanny resemblance to Michael Townley.

Is Townley still alive?...I think he may well be. CIA 'asset' for our 'warm and fuzzy' coups, assassinations and government overthrows.

Yes, I think he is still alive. They should try and extradite him for this. Definitely a company man and for hire.

[Magda Hassan]

Chile launches search for suspect in alleged Neruda poisoning

June 4, 2013 by Joseph Fitsanakis Leave a comment

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The government of Chile has launched an official search for a United States suspect in connection with the alleged poisoning of celebrated poet Pablo Neruda. The Chilean literary icon, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971, died on September 23, 1973. His death occurred less than two weeks after a coup d'état, led by General Augusto Pinochet, toppled the democratically elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende, a close friend of Neruda. The death of the internationally acclaimed poet, who was 69 at the time, was officially attributed to prostate cancer and the effects of acute mental stress over the military coup. Earlier this year, however, an official investigation was launched into Neruda's death following allegations that he had been murdered. The investigation was sparked by a comment made by Neruda's personal driver, Manuel Araya, who said that the poet had been deliberately injected with poison while receiving treatment for cancer at the Clinica Santa Maria in Chilean capital Santiago. Investigators are still awaiting the completion of a complex autopsy performed on Neruda's remains, which were exhumed in April. But the Chilean government has already issued a search order for a medical doctor or someone pretending to be a doctor who was allegedly on Neruda's bedside on the night of his death. The search was issued based on comments made recently by another medical doctor, Sergio Draper, who supervised Neruda's hospital treatment in September of 1973. Dr. Draper told government investigators that he turned over his shift that night to a "Dr. Price", a young doctor in his late 20s, who was with Neruda in the hours leading to the poet's death. According to Rodolfo Reyes, a lawyer representing the Neruda estate, Dr.Price's identity remains a mystery. The lawyer told Chilean newspaper La Tercera back in April that Dr. Price is believed to be an American "with blue eyes and very good manners". Some supporters of the view that Neruda was poisoned claim that the physical description of Dr. Price is very close to that of Michael Townley. Townley was an agent of the United States Central Intelligence Agency who was hired by DINA, the secret police of the Chilean dictatorship, to assassinate Orlando Letelier, a Chilean former diplomat who was a vocal opponent of the Pinochet regime. Townley was arrested following Letelier's 1976 assassinating in Washington, DC. He was convicted to only 62 months in prison, in return for agreeing to collaborate with US government investigators. But there is said to be unconfirmed evidence that Townley, who is currently living under the US federal witness protection program, was in Florida at the time of Neruda's death in Santiago. Chilean government investigators say there is no entry for a "Dr. Price" in the registry of hospital staff at the Clinica Santa Maria during the time of Neruda's death.
http://intelnews.org/2013/06/04/01-1272/

[Magda Hassan]

Can Jeff Stein be so naive to think a government connected assassin would travel on their own passport or not have recourse to dozens of them? And in different nationalities?

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'CIA DOUBLE AGENT' UNLIKELY HIT MAN IN PABLO NERUDA'S DEATH[/TD]
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[TD="class: generalcell"]If famed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was assassinated in his hospital bed 40 years ago, as prosecutors in Santiago now suspect, the killer was almost certainly not Michael Townley, the US-born operative named in widespread news reports.Townley, who would later become a Chilean secret police agent, was in Miami at the time, according to John Dinges, a former Washington Post foreign news editor who coauthored an investigative book on a political murder that Townley was indeed involved in, "Assassination on Embassy Row."
Dinges has a photocopy of Townley's U.S. passport, which the operative was issued under the name of Kenneth Enyart on Oct 7, 1973, two weeks after Neruda's death. "It was a stolen identity," Dinges said.
"Neruda died on Sept. 23, 1973. Townley was in Miami between Apr. 2 and the third week of October, 1973," Dinges said in a telephone interview, citing stamps in the passport.
"He was not in Chile at the time he supposedly participated in this murder. So it's highly unlikely that time he had anything to do with it."
Chilean prosecutors and a family lawyer now think Neruda, an ardent communist, was poisoned to death on the orders of military officials who had overthrown the elected government of Neruda's friend and ally, Dr. Salvador Allende, only 12 days earlier.
A doctor who had previously testified that he was at Neruda's bedside when he died from cancer "has changed his story," the London Independent reported over the weekend.
"Dr Sergio Draper now claims a doctor called Price was with Neruda. There is no record of a Doctor Price in any of the hospital's records and Draper said he never saw the man again after leaving him with Neruda," The Independent's Nick Clark reported.
The mystery doctor gave Neruda an injection, Draper says."The prosecutor believes that whoever the man was, 'the important fact is that this was the person who ordered the injection' that may have killed Neruda."
Draper described the mystery doctor as "tall and blond with blue eyes," Clark reported, which "matches Michael Townley, a CIA double agent who worked with the Chilean secret police under Pinochet."
But Townley is not blond, said Dinges, a tenured professor at the Columbia University School journalism school. His hair is light brown, at best, Dinges said.
The misunderstanding arises from an English translation of the Spanish word for blond, "rubio." Chileans, who have very dark or black hair, commonly use "rubio" to describe anyone with hair lighter than their own, Dinges said.
Townley was an assassin, though. He spent five years in a U.S. prison after confessing to his role in and implicating Chilean secret police agents in the 1976 assassination of a prominent Chilean exile, Orlando Letelier, in Washington, DC. He was then released into the US witness protection program. He is believed to be living in Florida.
The widespread description of Townley as a "CIA double agent" is also wrong, according to Dinges and other experts on the Chilean military regime.
It's a conspiracy theory peddled by both leftists and right-wing Pinochet sympathizers in Chile, Dinges said.
Manuel Contreras, the Chilean secret police chief during the regime's murderous reign, uses it to deflect responsibility for his global assassination missions.
Contreras may even have picked the US-born Townley, the son of a Ford Motor Company in Chile, "as a built-in alibi so he could say these assassinations weren't done by a Chilean agent, this was an AmericanCIA agent," Dinges said.
The CIA is a favorite whipping post for Chile's left, too.
"The left in Chile has jumped on pretty much the same thing," Dinges said, "blaming things on Townley where he's really not connected, and without checking evidence on whether ... he was even in the country."
Townley, who was involved with the right wing extremist group "Fatherland and Liberty" during the Allende era, left Chile in April 1973 with the police in pursuit of him for questioning in a murder investigation, Dinges said. "He was on a watch list so wouldn't have returned" until after Allende was violently replaced by a right wing military regime.
He returned about 10 days after Neruda died.
"This was two weeks after the coup. The military was just getting their act together. DINA (acronym for the new National Intelligence Directorate) wasn't up and running yet," Dinges said.
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"Assuming for the moment the military did it, they really would have had to put this together on the fly. The regime really didn't have an assassination apparatus in place" when Neruda died, Dinges said. "They were killing people in the streets and dumping their bodies in rivers, but their intelligence apparatus was very primitive."[/TD]
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http://www.andmagazine.com/content/phoenix/12993.html

[Peter Lemkin]

I was just checking and it seems Townley is safely hidden in the US 'Witness Protection Program'....with new identity, false documents and hidden location - perhaps even guards. His physical location could be anywhere in the World with the Empire not wanting him to be brought to Justice - as it implicates them!