Posted by
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
Wednesday 10 April 2013
On 22 September 1973, Nobel
laureate Pablo Neruda – whom
Gabriel García Márquez dubbed "the greatest poet of the 20th century"
– received some visitors at the Santa María hospital in Chile's capital Santiago. Among
them were Sweden's ambassador Harald Edelstam and the Mexican ambassador
Gonzalo Martínez Corbala, offering a plane to fly Neruda and his wife Matilde
into exile.
We know about their
conversation thanks to as yet unpublished documents at the National Archive in
Sweden. Edelstam asserts he found the poet "very ill" though still
willing to travel to Mexico. In a memo sent to his superiors, Edelstam
observes: "In his last hours [Neruda] either didn't know or didn't
recognise he suffered a terminal illness. He complained that rheumatism made it
impossible to move his arms and legs. When we visited him, Neruda was preparing
as best he could to travel … to Mexico. There, he would make a public
declaration against the military regime."
That made the poet dangerous
to some very powerful people, who had shown they would stop at nothing to
defend their interests. They had ousted his friend, Salvador Allende, from the
presidency less than a fortnight earlier. Allende died in a coup that was as
much about silencing dissident voices as bringing about regime change. Another
voice, that of popular singer Víctor
Jara, was cut off four days later. Neruda remained. He was perhaps the
loudest. His face certainly the most recognisable worldwide. He was too
dangerous.
Members of the junta are on
record expressing the view on the morning of September 22 that if Neruda flew
into exile, his plane would fall into the sea. In the afternoon, radio stations
under military control announced the poet would probably die in the next few
hours, at a time when he was still awake in the hospital. The following day he
was dead.
That historical mystery
alone explains why his body was exhumed this week. But there are more pressing reasons too, at a
time when the destiny of the left hangs in the balance in Latin America. The
death of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, one of many leftist leaders in the region to
have fallen ill to cancer, has combined with the 700 documented assassination
attempts against Cuba's Fidel Castro to fuel all manner of conspiracy theories.
More important still is the
fact that, faced with an economic crisis without foreseeable end and few
alternatives, a new generation of world activists needs to reconnect with the
vibrant political imagination embodied by Neruda. The question is not merely
whether the commitment he exemplified is possible now, but whether technology,
and the institutions we use to manage it, can allow the kind of freedom Neruda
called for in his poetry.
In this context, Neruda's
life, as well as the shadows cast by his death, are Google-bombs waiting to be
set off by a new generation of networked freedom fighters at the heart of our
austerity-obsessed, repressive, and frankly boring narratives.
Neruda wasn't surprised by
the 1973 coup – most people knew that the consequences of restoring
"economic order" would be vicious, and many accepted it as necessary
– but it wasn't inevitable: under a deal accepted by the government coalition
as well as the opposition, President Allende was going to call for a referendum
and would have resigned if the result went against him. This made any show of
force by the smaller but influential sector within the Chilean armed forces
unnecessary. But the conspirators were bent on regime change, so they brought
forward the date of the coup, subjecting Chilean society to a trial by fire in
order to cure it of a supposedly menacing communist "cancer".
The invocation of
"cancer" to provide yesterday's rulers with a pretext to unleash war
abroad and repression at home is mirrored by the questions being asked about
Neruda's cancer today.
Neruda and the other
individuals behind the Chilean revolution of the early 1970s made mistakes and
were at least partially responsible for the consequences. But the real story
behind their defeat and deaths hasn't been told yet. This is one of the reasons
why people are looking to unearth new truths, hoping to shed some light on the
origins of our problems today.
Through histories,
testimonies, and documents declassified in the US or revealed as recently as
last year by Wikileaks, we now know that the fate of Neruda and others like him
had been decided long before they had any hand in mismanaging the economy or
dividing political opinion. Persecution of the left had begun in Chile as early
as 1948, at the behest of a US government awash with anti-communist paranoia.
That year, a controversial
measure known as "the Damned Law" ("la ley maldita")
outlawed the Chilean Communist Party, sent the communist leadership into exile
and imprisoned hundreds of militants at the Pisagua camp under the orders of a
young lieutenant named Augusto Pinochet – the concentration camp's director who
would become Chile's dictator, and a friend and inspiration to Margaret Thatcher.
Neruda, radicalised like
many others by the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s and 40s, chose to flee
the country. Fearing for his life he crossed the Andes on a horse, carrying
with him the manuscript of his epic poem Canto General,
before resurfacing in Mexico thanks to the help of his friends Pablo Picasso
and Diego Rivera.
His second exile would have
been in 1973. Edelstam's conversation with Neruda took place a mere two hours
before the poet went to sleep, never to wake up again. When the Swedish
diplomat went to Neruda's house to offer his condolences, he found it
destroyed. Pinochet's men were bent on erasing every trace of his existence.
They would do the same with thousands of people during a reign of terror that
would last for nearly two decades.
[...]
