Fiskales Ad-Hok

The story told in Chile says that Fiskales Ad-Hok opened for the Ramones and that the night was their baptism. It is true, and it falls short. On the thirteenth of September of 1992 the Ramones played in the country for the first time, and that date was not just another stop on a long tour: it was the first night of the Mondo Bizarro world tour. The world tour of the Ramones began in Santiago, and it was opened by a band from the Santiago underground that had spent six years playing wherever it was let in.

Santiago, 1986, and a post in the military courts

The band counts itself from 1986: it celebrated twenty years in 2006 and twenty-five in November of 2011, always counting from there, although the reference works argue between the end of that year and the first months of 1987. The original line-up was Álvaro España on vocals, Rubén "Roly" Urzúa on bass, Mario "Pogo" Carneyro on guitar and vocals, "Polo" on drums and "Cyril" on the other guitar. The first recording is a demo, Matarratas, from 1987, the same year as their first show, at the Primera Bienal Underground, and of their debut at El Trolley, the Santiago venue.

The name comes from a post that existed exactly like that. The reference works trace it to the fiscal militar ad hoc, the ad hoc military prosecutor, an extraordinary judicial appointment that pulled specific cases out of the ordinary procedure of the courts, and the man who embodied it has a first and last name: Juan Fernando Alfredo Torres Silva, soldier and lawyer, appointed ad hoc military prosecutor after the attempt on Augusto Pinochet's life in 1986, the same year the band was born. He gathered into his own hands the cases against the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez — the Carrizal Bajo arms cache, the raid on the Panadería Lautaro, the kidnapping of Colonel Carlos Carreño — and afterwards he was a member of the Corte Marcial and Auditor General of the Army. Once democracy had returned he was prosecuted for helping the chemist Eugenio Berríos leave the country in 1991, sentenced to ten years and sent to Punta Peuco prison. He died in 2021, under house arrest with terminal cancer.

Out in front of all of it was Álvaro España, who is the voice and the face of the whole band and who, a detail that tends to surprise people who have been listening to him for decades, cannot play any instrument. Pogo, on the other hand, did not last long. Chilean, he had emigrated to Spain at nineteen; back in Santiago he co-hosted the radio programme Melodías Subterráneas with Rolando Ramos, and it was through that show that he was discovered and brought into Fiskales. He was there for the early stretch, he left soon and he left on good terms, before the records that matter. His own work is somewhere else: at the start of the nineties he founded Los Peores de Chile with the guitarists Alejandro "Jando" and Claudio "Klein" Guzmán and the drummer Bruno Astele.

The Velódromo, and the first night of a tour

The venue was not the Estadio Nacional, as the story keeps repeating. It was the Velódromo of the Estadio Nacional, the cycling arena inside the stadium grounds, another stage and another scale, and the Ramones arrived with Mondo Bizarro just out and without ever having set foot in Chile. The setlist recorded for that night has twenty-seven songs. Fiskales opened, with six years of the small circuit behind them and not one record released yet: the first LP, self-titled, only came out in 1993 on La Batuta and Alerce.

The confusion the popular account drags along has a concrete cause: the Ramones came to Chile twice. The second time was the sixteenth of May of 1994, at the Teatro Monumental, on the Acid Eaters tour. Fiskales opened the first one, the one at the Velódromo, the one that was starting the world tour. And there is a third source of trouble for anyone who goes looking: the Chilean shows by Marky Ramone's Blitzkrieg, the drummer's band, came later and are not the Ramones.

A label of their own and number forty-two

The second record, Traga, came out in 1995 on Culebra, a BMG sub-label, and it is the only one the band made with a multinational. In 1997 they founded their own: C.F.A., Corporación Fonográfica Autónoma. Everything that came afterwards came out through it, and that includes the record they are remembered for. Autonomy does not mean solitude: España told in 2025 that Jorge González made them a present of equipment, and that he handed it over saying "it is for you, so that you sound better".

Fiesta was released in November of 1998, on the label of their own, and it is the third studio album. It is fifteen hardcore punk songs, recorded by España on vocals, Marcelo Larralde "Víbora" on guitar, Michael "Micky" Cumplido on drums and Roly Urzúa on bass — Pogo is not on it — and among them there is a version of "Resistiré", by the Dúo Dinámico: the most celebrated record of Chilean punk closes ranks with a classic of nineteen-sixties Spanish pop. Rolling Stone Chile put it at number forty-two in Los 50 mejores discos chilenos, its ranking of the fifty best Chilean albums, in issue 121, from April of 2008.

There are no chart placings or sales figures to add, and that is part of the point. Fiskales did not build a career of charts but of records of their own and stages won: seven studio albums, a documentary from 2004 — Malditos, la historia de los Fiskales Ad-Hok, by Pablo Insunza — that widened their audience, the Vive Latino at the Club Hípico in Santiago on Sunday the fifteenth of April of 2007 and the night of Friday the thirtieth of October of 2009 at the Estadio Bicentenario in La Florida, opening for Sepultura and Faith No More. Between 12, from 2009, and El Flagelo, from the fifteenth of December of 2019, twelve years went by with no new record.

Nine portraits and a Mapuche spear

On Sunday the thirty-first of March of 2019, at the Lollapalooza in Parque O'Higgins, Fiskales played "Mi cadáver" and projected onto a red background nine illustrations of figures of the Chilean right run through by a Mapuche spear: Pinochet, Lucía Hiriart, Jaime Guzmán, Sebastián Piñera, José Antonio Kast, Andrés Chadwick, Jacqueline van Rysselberghe, Patricia Maldonado and Ricardo Ezzati. The image was neither new nor improvised: it recycles the cover of their first album, where the one run through by the spear was Pedro de Valdivia, the Spanish conquistador who founded Santiago. They swapped the conquistador for the living. From the stage, España closed by saying that while they were celebrating, the Mapuche people were putting up a terrible fight.

Kast answered the same day, and he did it by handing the word back to them: "This is the true face of fascism: the ones who are on the stage. Those who seek to impose their totalitarian ideology and eliminate their adversaries". He called the graphics "an explicit call to violence, a threat and an unacceptable expression of hatred" and challenged Perry Farrell, the creator of Lollapalooza, in writing. The next day, the first of April, the Minister Secretary General of the Presidency, Gonzalo Blumel, had to come out and speak: "Promoting hatred, promoting violence is something that is not tolerable". The author of the illustrations, Tomás Ives, replied that the message was anti-fascist and that they were neither propaganda nor a call to hatred. The festival crowd, according to the report from that afternoon, applauded.

There is the real measure of what happened: a punk band with a label of its own forced the Minister of the Presidency to make a statement, from a festival stage. España was fifty years old. That same 2019 he also made his debut as a wrestler, on the nineteenth of August, in the Batalla Real of the Campeonato Nacional de Lucha Libre: he came into the ring with "No estar aquí" playing and eliminated his rival by throwing him over the ropes.

October of 2022, and February of 2025

Pogo died on Monday the third of October of 2022, at sixty-five, of lung cancer. He had not been in Fiskales for decades: he died as the leader of Los Peores de Chile, who announced it in a statement saying that he had gone surrounded by his family. He had refused conventional treatment. He was a writer too: he published the short stories of Morfopunk and the autobiography El peor libro de Chile. España said goodbye to him with a sentence that needs no explanation: "He left the way he wanted, without God or Law". Two days later, in Diario Usach, he added that he was "a hero as a musician, in a country where it is so hard to make art".

In February of 2025 Fiskales announced an indefinite hiatus and cancelled their national dates. They honoured the European tour they had already committed to and said goodbye on the thirty-first of March of 2025 at the Sala RBX, a club in Santiago. In August of that year España was describing the band as being in self-imposed hibernation, because of internal conflicts, and saying that he had thought he was going to die playing. There was no scandal, no farewell record, no stadium tour: they were the ones who stopped.

What to remember

Fiskales Ad-Hok is the band that opened the first night of a world tour without having a record out. That happened on the thirteenth of September of 1992 at the Velódromo of the Estadio Nacional, and it is a better fact than the legend, because the legend only says that they were the support act for their idols. What came afterwards is explained by the label they founded in 1997 better than by any adjective: Fiesta in November of 1998, number forty-two from Rolling Stone Chile and thirty years of stages without ever going through a multinational again. They had been baptised with the post of a soldier who ended up sentenced to ten years and locked up in Punta Peuco; the soldier died facing prosecution and the band went on playing.

And the ending does not look like anyone else's either. Almost forty years after having started under the dictatorship, with a farewell in March of 2025 that was in a club and not in a stadium, Fiskales stopped by a decision of their own. When one of those two-minute blasts comes on and somebody of twenty shouts the whole thing, there is what they did: a long career built without anyone's permission, one that began by opening the night for the Ramones and ended when they wanted it to end.

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Sources

Fiskales Ad-Hok is a punk and hardcore punk band formed in Santiago de Chile in 1986, according to the band itself, which celebrated its 20 years in 2006 and its 25 in November of 2011; the reference works argue over the dating, between the end of 1986 and the beginning of 1987. Original line-up: Álvaro España (vocals), Rubén "Roly" Urzúa (bass), Mario "Pogo" Carneyro (guitar and vocals), "Polo" (drums) and "Cyril" (guitar). First recording: the demo "Matarratas" (1987); first show at the 1st Bienal Underground and debut at El Trolley, both in 1987; EP "Por fin llegó el indulto" (1988). The name refers to the post of fiscal militar ad hoc, the ad hoc military prosecutor, an extraordinary judicial appointment embodied by Juan Fernando Alfredo Torres Silva (1939-2021), designated after the attempt on Augusto Pinochet's life in 1986, in charge of the cases against the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez (the Carrizal Bajo arms cache, the raid on the Panadería Lautaro, the kidnapping of Colonel Carlos Carreño), later a member of the Corte Marcial and Auditor General of the Army, sentenced under democracy to 10 years for helping the chemist Eugenio Berríos leave the country in 1991 and held at Punta Peuco; he died in 2021 under house arrest with terminal cancer. On 13 September 1992 Fiskales Ad-Hok was the opening act for the Ramones' debut in Chile, at the Velódromo of the Estadio Nacional in Santiago, the first date of the world tour for the album "Mondo Bizarro", with a recorded setlist of 27 songs; the Ramones returned to Chile only once more, on 16 May 1994, at the Teatro Monumental, during the "Acid Eaters" tour. Studio discography: "Fiskales Ad-Hok" (1993, La Batuta / Alerce), "Traga" (1995, Culebra / BMG, their only record with a multinational), "Fiesta" (November 1998, C.F.A.), "Calavera" (2001, C.F.A.), "Lindo momento frente al caos" (2007, C.F.A. / Oveja Negra), "12" (2009, C.F.A. / The Knife) and "El Flagelo" (15 December 2019, Pulpa Discos), twelve years after the previous one. In 1997 the band founded its own label, C.F.A. (Corporación Fonográfica Autónoma). "Fiesta", the third studio album, has 15 songs and was recorded by Álvaro España (vocals), Marcelo Larralde "Víbora" (guitar), Michael "Micky" Cumplido (drums) and Roly Urzúa (bass), and includes a version of "Resistiré", by the Dúo Dinámico; it appears at number 42 in "Los 50 mejores discos chilenos" by Rolling Stone Chile, issue 121, April 2008. Other milestones: the live record "Ahora" (2000, recorded at La Batuta in April 2000), European tours in 2000 and 2004, the documentary "Malditos, la historia de los Fiskales Ad-Hok" (2004, Pablo Insunza), Vive Latino Chile on Sunday 15 April 2007 at the Club Hípico in Santiago and Friday 30 October 2009 at the Estadio Bicentenario in La Florida, opening for Sepultura and Faith No More. On Sunday 31 March 2019, at Lollapalooza Chile (Parque O'Higgins), the band projected during "Mi cadáver" nine illustrations of figures of the Chilean right run through by a Mapuche spear —Augusto Pinochet, Lucía Hiriart, Jaime Guzmán, Sebastián Piñera, José Antonio Kast, Andrés Chadwick, Jacqueline van Rysselberghe, Patricia Maldonado and Ricardo Ezzati—, an image that recycles the cover of their first album, where the one run through was Pedro de Valdivia, the Spanish conquistador who founded Santiago; the author of the graphics is Tomás Ives. Kast replied the same day and challenged Perry Farrell; on 1 April 2019 the Minister Secretary General of the Presidency, Gonzalo Blumel, declared that "promoting hatred, promoting violence is something that is not tolerable". Álvaro España was 50 years old at that festival; on 19 August 2019 he made his debut as a wrestler in the Batalla Real of the Campeonato Nacional de Lucha Libre, entering the ring with "No estar aquí". Mario "Pogo" Carneyro, a founder who passed only briefly through Fiskales Ad-Hok and is absent from "Fiesta", emigrated to Spain at 19, co-hosted with Rolando Ramos the radio programme "Melodías Subterráneas" (1986-1987), founded Los Peores de Chile at the start of the nineties together with Alejandro "Jando" Guzmán, Claudio "Klein" Guzmán and Bruno Astele, and published the books "Morfopunk" and "El peor libro de Chile"; he died on Monday 3 October 2022, at 65, of lung cancer, after refusing conventional treatment, according to the statement from his band. Álvaro España said goodbye to him with the sentence "he left the way he wanted, without God or Law" (La Tercera, 3 October 2022) and in Diario Usach, on 5 October 2022, described him as "a hero as a musician, in a country where it is so hard to make art". In February 2025 Fiskales Ad-Hok announced an indefinite hiatus and cancelled their national dates; they honoured their European tour and gave their farewell concert on 31 March 2025 at the Sala RBX. In August 2025 Álvaro España described the band as being in "self-imposed hibernation" because of internal conflicts. No chart placings or sales certifications have been documented for any album by the band. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, setlist.fm, Rolling Stone Chile, La Tercera, The Clinic, El Desconcierto, El Dínamo, BioBioChile, El Mostrador, Publimetro, Diario Usach, Radio Futuro and the catalogue of the Museo de la Memoria.