Mexican ambassador Gonzalo Martinez speaks during an interview with AFP in Mexico City, Mexico. Martinez, who was the Mexican ambassador to Chile in 1973, visited Chilean poet Pablo Neruda one day before his death to arrange the details for the Neruda´s departure from Chile after the coup d'état. Martinez is in favor to investigate the death of the Nobel prize, who was “perfectly lucid” on te eve of his death and not catatonic, as apparently his death certificate said. -AFP Photo

SANTIAGO: Officials in Chile said they will launch a murder investigation into the death of Nobel Prize-winning writer Pablo Neruda, who died 12 days after the 1973 coup that overthrew the government.

It had long been believed that the writer, among Latin America's most renowned literary figures, had died of cancer, but officials here said they now will try to determine whether Neruda was the victim of homicide.

The move Thursday was ordered by a judge after the poet's longtime associate Manuel Araya, who worked as his secretary, personal assistant and driver, came forward to say Neruda was also assassinated by the General Augusto Pinochet regime.

The investigation into Neruda's death follows last month's decision by the Chilean government to exhume the remains of former president Salvador Allende, hoping to finally determine whether he committed suicide or was murdered during the coup led by Pinochet.

Araya, who was at the poet's bedside until a few hours before his death at the age of 69, caused a media stir last month with the claims he had been hospitalized at the Santa Maria Clinic in Santiago “not because of worsening health, but for his security.”

Neruda, he said, was “anxious and tense,” and that he believed the new regime was bent on eliminating him, and was alarmed by an injection administered by a doctor a night before he had planned to fly to Mexico.

Araya said Pinochet feared he would go into exile as a high-profile dissident.

“Pinochet was a murderer. He killed Neruda so he wouldn't leave the country, because he was an intellectual that (Pinochet) did not want to have as an opponent,” Araya, 65, told AFP last month.

The Pablo Neruda Foundation still insists the poet died on September 23, 1973, from prostate cancer aggravated by emotional distress, after seeing Pinochet overthrow Neruda's friend Salvador Allende the coup.

The Foundation, which owns the rights to the poet's work and is charged with maintaining his legacy, has has said there is “no indication and no proof whatsoever that suggests that Pablo Neruda died of causes other than the cancer, at an advanced stage, that he had suffered from,” it said in a statement.

“It does not seem reasonable to construct a new version of his death solely based on the opinion of his driver,” the group said last month.

Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, is best-known for his love poems as well as his “Canto General” an epic poem about South America's history and its people.

He was a senior member of Chile's Communist Party whose writings were work banned during Pinochet's 1973-1990 military dictatorship.