Aramis Camilo is a Dominican merengue singer and bandleader, known as El Padrino. He led La Organización Secreta through the golden decade of merengue in the eighties, and he did something no Dominican singer had tried before him: he changed what a merenguero was allowed to look like on stage.

Villa Tapia

He was born in 1962 in Villa Tapia, in the province of Hermanas Mirabal. His father, Ernesto Camilo, was a trumpet player, and the interest came early — school events and the singing festivals that were then the way a Dominican teenager got heard.

He began professionally as a teenager in the orchestra of Luichy Herrera, in Baní, and stayed four years. At the end of the seventies he moved to the capital and took work at the Piano Bar Don Guillermo, which belonged to Guillermo Henríquez.

El Tente

In 1983 he recorded El Tente and put it on the radio himself. It worked well enough that the impresario Raphy D’Oleo went into partnership with him, and the two of them built an orchestra. The name came from outside: Juan Pachanga, a dancer with the band of Dioni Fernández y El Equipo, suggested La Organización Secreta.

The band debuted on 2 August 1983, in the same piano bar where he had been working. Its front line was Lenny Camacho and Benny Sadel, who recorded Señorita and Llévame Contigo before going on to careers of their own.

The look

What set him apart was as much visual as musical. Before him no merenguero would risk extravagant clothes; he went out in dark glasses, gloves, white boots and a wide-brimmed hat, and carried a wand, which then gave him a song. His audience copied all of it, wand included.

At his height the press and the public were comparing him with Fernando Villalona, which in the merengue of the eighties was the highest available comparison. El Motor, La Varita, Joselyn, Susana, Nena, El Alicate, Qué Cuerpo, El Repollo, Vuelve and Caballito Frenao are the songs that carried him.

The albums

The records came almost yearly through the boom: Joselyn in 1983, El Alicate in 1984, Susana in 1985, El Candado in 1986, Caballito Frenao in 1988, Candela in 1990, En Punto in 1992 and Realidad in 1994.

Outside the country

Panama gave him the Búho de Oro in 1984, the year the Premios El Dorado named La Organización Secreta the revelation of the year. He played the Lincoln Center in New York in 1985 and received the key to the city the following year, and the orchestra performed in Japan, Rome and other places where merengue had barely been heard.

In 1987 the designer Oscar de la Renta took him to the White House to perform for the first lady, Nancy Reagan. In 1990 Candela pa’ los Pies earned him a gold record, and he had a large following in Venezuela.

Soberano Especial

He has lived in New York since the middle of the nineties, and since 2008 has been part of Los Años Dorados del Merengue, the touring project built around the generation that made the eighties. He still fronts a new Organización Secreta, and in February 2025 he played El Motor at Premio Lo Nuestro alongside Manny Cruz.

In March 2025 Acroarte announced that he would receive a Soberano Especial at the fortieth edition of the awards, held that month at the Teatro Nacional Eduardo Brito, for a career that by then ran to forty-two years.