Miguel Zavaleta, singer and leader of the Argentine rock band Sueter, dies at 71

Miguel Zavaleta, the founder and leader of Sueter, died on Monday at 71 after living with cancer. Colleagues and friends confirmed the news, among them the singer Hilda Lizarazu and the journalist Sergio Marchi, who described him as one of the figures who best embodied the spirit of Argentina's chaotic 1980s.

His career ran more than four decades, and its most consequential stretch came early. Zavaleta was part of the wave that transformed Argentine rock in the last years of the military dictatorship and the first years of democracy, a period when the music carried more weight than the size of its audiences would suggest.

Before Sueter he played in the progressive rock group Bubu and moved through the underground scene that also produced future members of Los Abuelos de la Nada and Los Twist. Sueter itself formed in 1981 with Zavaleta on vocals and keyboards, and built an identity out of new wave, pop and rock delivered with a level of irony and polish that was rare locally at the time.

The band left standards behind. Amanece en la ruta remains one of the most durable songs in the national repertoire, and their version of Jugo de tomate frio, reworked with Charly Garcia, became emblematic in its own right. Garcia produced one of Sueter's most important albums and pushed the idea of finishing an abandoned track, which is how that recording came to exist.

Zavaleta was a serious musician who refused to be solemn about it. He was a nephew of the jazz pianist Enrique Mono Villegas, rejected the genre in youth for rock and came back to it later, saying in an interview that he had taken to studying and playing standards for four or five hours a day. He also said he had been putting on his own show since he was four years old, and that the stage was the only place in the world where he felt comfortable and safe.

He stayed active in recent years, both solo and with various incarnations of Sueter, and kept an interest in younger acts, sharing a stage with Goyo Degano of Bandalos Chinos. Looking back at the generation he came up with, which included Fabiana Cantilo, Daniel Melingo and Cachorro Lopez, he put it plainly. "For once in my life I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right moment," he said, in remarks published in Spanish.

Argentina keeps revisiting that era on film and record, from a Netflix documentary on Fito Paez to the first images from Perfume, about the guitarist Maria Gabriela Epumer. Zavaleta's work sits in both the rock and latin traditions that period produced.