FILE - This Oct. 21, 1971 file photo shows Pablo Neruda, poet and then Chilean ambassador to France, talks with reporters in Paris after being named the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature. Chile's Communist Party asked to exhume the remains of the late Nobel literature laureate Pablo Neruda following allegations he may have been poisoned. Officially, Neruda died of cancer only days after the 1973 coup toppled his close friend, socialist President Salvador Allende. His body was exhumed on April 8, 2013. (AP Photo/Laurent Rebours, File)
Tests show Chile's Neruda suffered advanced cancer
FILE - This Oct. 21, 1971 file photo shows Pablo Neruda, poet and then Chilean ambassador to France, talks with reporters in Paris after being named the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature. Chile's Communist Party asked to exhume the remains of the late Nobel literature laureate Pablo Neruda following allegations he may have been poisoned. Officially, Neruda died of cancer only days after the 1973 coup toppled his close friend, socialist President Salvador Allende. His body was exhumed on April 8, 2013. (AP Photo/Laurent Rebours, File)
AP /
May 3, 2013
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SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — An early forensic test shows Chilean poet Pablo Neruda suffered from advanced prostate cancer when he died, but his actual cause of death has not been determined.
Neruda was exhumed last month to investigate allegations he was poisoned by Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Dr. Patricio Bustos heads Chile’s Medical Legal Service. He says that X-rays and a CT scan show the cancer had metastasized and spread to his hip and sacra, the triangular bone at the base of his spine.
Bustos says it’s just the first of many tests.
Neruda died in 1973 just days after Pinochet ousted the poet’s friend, President Salvador Allende, in a bloody coup.
The official version for years has been that Neruda died from natural causes. But Bustos says the recent test is not conclusive.
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