‘A fascist tried to electrocute us on stage’: the musicians who took on the Chilean junta
By the time Los Pinochet Boys formed in Santiago, Chile, in 1984, its teenage members had already spent a decade living under the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. You’d hear of their gigs only through word of mouth, while the few flyers that circulated held just the bare details of the event; their name alone meant they were under constant threat.
“Those were extremely dark times,” says Daniel Puente Encina, the band’s bassist and vocalist. “The fear of being detained or tortured to death was always present.”
He remembers their clandestine gigs as a “symphony of chaos and violence” – the band never finished a complete set as they were always interrupted by the police. “All of our shows ended with one, or more, band members injured and bleeding and the most unfortunate of us going to jail. Many times we were beaten, shot at, and on
