Los Wembler's de Iquitos

A shoemaker and his sons

Los Wembler's de Iquitos are a family band from Iquitos, the capital of the Peruvian Amazon, founded in 1968 by the shoemaker Salomón Sánchez Saavedra with his five sons; Spanish Wikipedia names the sons as Emerson Isaías, Jair, Alberto, Jairo and Misael. One paragraph of the Spanish article gives 1964 for the start. Oye Records describes them as the first band in Iquitos to play popular local rhythms on electric guitars, and Afropop lists AM radio from Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela, along with US and UK psychedelic rock, among their influences. Al Ritmo de Los Wembler's is dated 1971 by some and 1972 by MusicBrainz and Spanish Wikipedia, and they made roughly two or three albums a year through the 1970s. La danza del petrolero (1975) was followed by La amenaza verde (1975), El encanto de la selva and Carapira (1976), Fiesta en la selva (1977) and others up to 1980.

A summary of AllMusic, which we could not open, says Salomón died in 1979 and the band toured until about 1985. The Roots of Chicha (2007) and The Roots of Chicha 2 (2010) rediscovered them; they played Lima after 25 years in 2011 and gave their first US show at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn on July 9, 2015, also appearing at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival that year. Ikaro del Amor (2017) was their first new record in 25 years, per Afropop, and Visión del Ayahuasca (September 6, 2019, Barbès) was recorded in a French studio over a few days; Songlines gave 4 of 5 and said they have still got it. The 7-inch "Lamento Selvático" came in 2020, and they toured Europe in October and November 2025.

In 2024 Peru's Ministry of Culture named them Personalidad Meritoria de la Cultura, and a documentary, Sonido Amazónico, directed by Luis Chumbe Huamani, toured Peru that November. Counted among the creators of chicha with Los Destellos, Juaneco y su Combo and Los Mirlos, they were covered by Los Mirlos.