Pablo Neruda Death Investigation Risks Going Off Track

By Marianela Jarroud and Michael Warren, Associated Press/Huffington Post Latino Voices

SANTIAGO, Chile — U.S. experts on Chile’s dictatorship-era human rights violations said Monday that a judicial investigation into the death of poet Pablo Neruda risks going off track if it seriously looks at Michael Townley, an American who later worked as an assassin for Chile’s spy chief.

Townley was a violent right-wing militant who grew up in Chile in the 1960s and spread propaganda against Neruda’s great friend, Marxist President Salvador Allende, in early 1973. But experts said Townley was in Florida at the time of Neruda’s death on Sept. 23, 1973, just 12 days after Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s military coup ousted Allende. And contrary to the self-serving story put out by Pinochet’s spy chief, Townley was never a CIA agent, they said.

Peter Kornbluh, the author of “The Pinochet File, a Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability,” also discounted the idea that Townley was worth looking into.

“We all want to see this case solved, but false leads are not going to bring us any closer to arriving at the truth of Pablo Neruda’s very untimely death,” Kornbluh said.

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