Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda. Neruda wrote in a variety of styles such as erotically charged love poems as in his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language." Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was his personal color of hope. On July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people in honor of Communist revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes. During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a stint as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When Conservative Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in a house basement in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people. Neruda was hospitalized with cancer at the time of the Chilean coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet. Three days after being hospitalized, Neruda died of heart failure. Already a legend in life, Neruda's death reverberated around the world. Pinochet had denied permission to transform Neruda's funeral into a public event. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets.

Axis of Columnist Arturo Rosales offers the following poem by Pablo Neruda noting that it was often referred to by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Note the last two lines...

A Song for Bolívar Our father who art in the earth, in the water, in the air of all our great and silent breadth, all bears thy name, father, in our land: thy name the sugarcane raises to the sweetness, Bolivar tin has a Bolivar brilliance, the Bolivar bird over the Bolivar volcano, the potato, the saltpeter, the special shadows, the currents, the veins of phosphoric stone, all that is ours comes from thine extinguished life, thy heritage was rivers, plains, bell towers, thy heritage is this day our daily bread, father. Thy little brave captain's corpse has stretched to immensity its metallic form, suddenly thy fingers spread out through the snow and the southern fisher suddenly brings to light thy smile, thy voice throbbing in the nets. What color will be the rose that we lift next to thy heart? Red will be the rose that remembers thy step. How will the hands be that touch thine ashes? Red will be the hands that in thine ashes are born. And how is the seed of thy dead heart? Red is the seed of thy living heart. That is why there is today the circle of hands next to thee. Next to my hand there is another and another next to it, and still another, to the depths of the dark continent. And another hand that thou didst not then know comes also, Bolivar, to clasp thy hand from Teruel, from Madrid, from the Jarama, from the Ebro, from the prison, from the air, from the Spanish dead arrives this red hand that is a daughter of thine. Captain, fighter, where one mouth shouts liberty, where one ear listens, where one red soldier smashes a dark forehead, where one freeman's laurel blossoms, where a new banner is adorned with the blood of our illustrious dawn, Bolivar, captain, thy face is seen. Again amid powder and smoke thy sword comes to life. Again thy banner has been embroidered with blood. The evil ones attack thy seed again, nailed to another cross is the son of man. But toward hope thy shadow leads us, the laurel and the light of thy red army across the night of America look with thy look. Thine eyes that watch beyond the seas, beyond the peoples oppressed and wounded, beyond the black burned cities, thy voice is born anew, thy hand again is born: thine army defends the sacred banners: Liberty shakes the bloody bells, and a terrible sound of grief precedes the dawn reddened by the blood of man. Liberator, a world of peace was born in thine arms. Peace, bread, the wheat of thy blood were born, from our young blood, come from thy blood, will come peace, bread and wheat for the world that we shall make. I came upon Bolivar, one long morning, in Madrid, at the entrance to the Fifth Regiment. Father, I said to him, are you, or are you not, or who are you? And, looking at the Mountain Barracks, he said: "I awake every hundred years when the people awake." - Pablo Neruda