Like those anti-Neruda crusades of the past, Vivaldi and other academics say the current campaign has also gone too far. Augusto Pinochet seized power, and the military regime burned his books in public. In 1947, Chile's government outlawed the Communist Party, of which Neruda was a member, and accused him of treason. It's not the first time Neruda has fallen from grace. OTIS: "Neruda is not being taught at her school," says Brodsky, who adds that she has zero interest in reading his poetry.
I asked one of the students, 18-year-old Laura Brodsky, what she thinks of Neruda. OTIS: These high schoolers are in the streets of Santiago, the capital, demanding that a school psychologist who they say sexually molested a fellow student be fired. Meanwhile, the #MeToo movement marches on. OTIS: "Otherwise," he said, "readers would demand to know, why are you promoting a rapist?" Indignation was so strong that Chile's Congress in 2018 scrapped a proposal to rename the country's main international airport after Neruda. OTIS: Salvador Young, who buys online books for Chile's national digital library, says that for the past several years, he was instructed not to purchase Neruda's books. People are very scared of publishing Neruda, of showing Neruda.
LIETA VIVALDI: Definitely, there is a big difference. The result, says Lieta Vivaldi, a member of Chile's Feminist Lawyers Association, is that Neruda has been, more or less, canceled. What's more, in his memoirs, Neruda confessed to raping a cleaning woman in his hotel in 1930 in what is now Sri Lanka.
He was an infamous womanizer who abandoned his disabled daughter when she was a toddler. OTIS: Neruda's personal life is also coming under greater scrutiny. OYARZUN: So this one is saying, why don't you shut up? Why don't you shut up now? We women are in the streets. So the graffiti was a reference to this poem and saying, now, you be. But according to Oyarzun, some feminists saw it as Neruda telling his lover in the poem to keep her mouth shut. OTIS: This is an old clip of Neruda reading it. PABLO NERUDA: (Speaking Spanish, reading). She was referring to one of Neruda's most famous verses, an ode to silence called "Poem XV." OTIS: That's Kemy Oyarzun, a poet and a professor of gender studies at the University of Chile. And one of them said, Neruda, now you shut up. KEMY OYARZUN: As I was marching, I saw a lot of graffitis (ph). But more recently, he's come in for a grilling from Chile's #MeToo movement against sexual abuse that has organized huge street protests. OTIS: Often compared to Walt Whitman, Neruda became only the second Chilean to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking Spanish). He often wrote about the working class, Indigenous groups and Chile's natural beauty. In a country where poetry had long been composed by and for the well-to-do, Neruda was the poet of the people. OTIS: Neruda wrote some of his most heralded verses here including the sweeping "Canto General," a history of Latin America in 231 poems. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking Spanish). The site, known as Isla Negra, is now a museum. JOHN OTIS, BYLINE: Pablo Neruda's house sits atop massive black cliffs overlooking Chile's Pacific coast. In the latest controversy, Chile's feminist movement is denouncing Neruda as a male chauvinist and sexual predator. Pablo Neruda is widely considered Chile's greatest poet, but he's always been a polarizing figure, even now, nearly 50 years after his death.
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