What We Learned About Political Poisonings This Week

There’s a long and storied history of political poisonings—and an even longer and even more storied history of rumored political poisonings. It is said, but not proven, that figures as notable as Alexander the Great and Napoleon were ultimately stopped not by armies but by chemical assassination, yet the trail has long gone cold on the “who,” the “how,” and most importantly the “whether it actually happened.”

But this week, in 2013 CE, two cases of alleged political poisonings made the news. Both individuals were outspoken public figures with powerful enemies, but neither one’s death was officially attributed to poisoning. In the absence of hard evidence, rumors grew into full-on investigations, the results of which surfaced this week.

For starter’s, even after his body was exhumed and examined, it’s still unclear if Yasser Arafat was poisoned. After he died in November 2004, there was no autopsy, and the doctors at the French hospital where Arafat died couldn’t legally release his medical records to the public.

Al Jazeera obtained some of the late Palestinian leader’s possessions in 2011 and turned them over to a Swiss investigation team. The team found evidence of polonium—which was used in the high-profile poisoning of a former KGB agent in London in 2006—on Arafat’s toothbrush and high levels of radioactivity in his urine. In 2012, Arafat’s body was exhumed and samples of his bones, burial shroud, and soil from his grave were taken to be examined.

Results of the new analyses revealed the presence of polonium in Arafat's bone samples.  Matter settled, right? Al Jazeera seems to think so, and posted a video explaining, “How polonium-201 killed Yassir Arafat.” (Spoiler: It sounds excruciating).

But the journal Nature stopped short of saying that the polonium found in Arafat’s body was proof that he was assassinated. If the polonium was from a synthetic source—which would be further proof that it was intentionally and perniciously introduced into Arafat’s body—there wouldn’t be a proportionate amount of lead-210 found there too, because synthetic polonium-210 doesn’t contain the lead.

The researchers not only found enough lead-210 to keep it from being the “smoking gun,” in some cases they found a disproportionately high levels of lead-210. This could mean a couple of things, one of which is that the tests were done improperly.

What it doesn’t mean, though, is that Arafat was definitely poisoned or not. Even if the lead-210 had been perfectly proportionate to polonium-210, the polonium could have plausibly been contaminated with lead, to hide the fact that it was synthetic. Nine years and one exhumation later, we still don’t know.

But if you need something definitive on long-rumored poisoning, you at least got some answers this week. This week Chilean poet, diplomatic, and avowed Communist Pablo Neruda was found to have definitely died of cancer in 1973.

Neruda died 12 days after Chile’s President Salvador Allende, a personal friend of Neruda, was deposed by the right-wing regime of General Augusto Pinochet. Neruda’s Communism had gotten him into trouble in the past: when the politics of Chile swung unfavorably against him in the ‘40s, he was forced to flee his homeland on horseback. Poets, man.

Given the proximity of his death with the CIA-assisted coup d’état, and Neruda’s uncompromising political outspokenness (publishing anti-Pinochet literature right up to the end), the poet’s friends and family have long maintained that there was foul play involved in his death and not just the prostate cancer that his death had been attributed to.

Finally, in April, the Chilean government, at the prompting of Neruda’s family and the Chilean Communist Party, exhumed Neruda’s body to look for evidence of poisoning. They didn’t find any.

Instead, it looks like the body matches the official story. According to the Los Angeles Times, the exhumation “confirmed the existence of metastatic lesions disseminated in various segments of the skeleton that correspond exactly with the disease for which Mr. Pablo Neruda was being treated.” There were “no chemical agents found,” according to the director of the Chilean Forensic Service.

Still, the family and party want more tests to be done, even as they accept the results of this first round of testing. “They referred to chemical agents but there are no studies about biological agents,” Communist Party lawyer Eduardo Contreras told the BBC. “A very important chapter has closed and was done very seriously but this is not over."

Even with all of the sophisticated forensics tools at our disposal, investigators seem to run up against barriers that aren’t as scientific so much as they philosophical, namely, “the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.” In that vein, maybe science isn’t the way to go.

As Neruda was a poet, maybe a turn to literature is instructive: if you need to prove that someone was a poisoner, there’s really only one way to do it: stage a play and make the suspected killer watch it. If they leave the room, they’re guilty! Or maybe they just have to go to the bathroom. Actually, it’s a method that leaves a lot to be desired too.