Episode Details

Pablo Neruda died twelve days after the Pinochet coup in 1973. The official cause was cancer, but his driver and personal assistant said he was injected with something at the hospital. Decades later, forensic scientists found a suspicious bacterium in his exhumed remains.

This episode traces Neruda's life from his early love poetry to his Communist politics, his Nobel Prize, and the forensic investigation that may yet prove his death was an assassination.

• How Twenty Love Poems made him famous before he turned 20
• His years as a diplomat, senator, and committed Communist
• The circumstances of his death during the first days of the Pinochet dictatorship
• The forensic investigation into Clostridium botulinum found in his remains