by Julian Matthew Formadero and Lance Carlo Mendoza

In May 2016, with 16 million votes, the Philippines elected Rodrigo Duterte as its 16th president. The foul-mouthed former mayor of Davao, who was a virtual nobody just a year prior, won on a promise of eradicating illegal drugs. Three years later, on the opposite side of the globe, El Salvador elected Nayib Bukele, former mayor of the capital San Salvador, with a 53% majority. Ruling under a “state of exception” to crack down on criminal gangs, the previous political outsider is now commanding an overwhelming popularity. In 2024, “the world’s coolest dictator” Bukele was reelected to a questionable second term.

Both men would ascend to their respective presidencies unprecedentedly and unexpectedly – with Duterte being the first president from the southern island of Mindanao and Bukele being the first president not to come from their two major parties.

Both would focus on sweeping, far-reaching security campaigns, one focusing on illegal drugs and the other on gang violence. And both would be greatly rewarded for it, with skyrocketing popularity figures.

Duterte would surprisingly step down at the end of his term in 2022. He is now being probed by the International Criminal Court for human rights violations. Bukele, meanwhile, just won a second term following a reinterpretation of the Salvadoran constitution.

All Politics is Local?

Bukele’s first electoral position was the mayoralty of Nuevo Cuscatlán, a small coffee town a few kilometers south of the capital. He was elected in 2012, under the banner of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), one of the two main Salvadoran parties. In a nation then-defined by astronomically high homicide rates, Bukele boasted of Nuevo Cuscatlán’s single recorded homicide in Bukele’s entire 3-year stint as mayor.

The FMLN decided to field him for the 2015 mayoralty race in the capital, where he won, and immediately worked on making the world’s murder capital safer, by physically “reordering” the city. Bukele and the FMLN would later part ways due to internal disagreements, but he would win reelection in 2018, more popular than ever.

His Philippine counterpart banked on the same appeal in his presidential bid, citing the effectiveness of his law and order policies in making Davao a “safe city,” whose experience needs to be emulated by the rest of the country.

And yet, despite their popularities, both Duterte and Bukele were political outsiders in a way. Duterte was a Mindanaoan mayor, Bukele was expelled by his party. These political hotshots needed to tap on the same sentiments harbored by Filipinos and Salvadorans – it’s time for a change. Duterte and Bukele portrayed themselves as a break from the political establishment, fresh faces with a local track record to back their words up. And it worked.

Populist Solutions for Populist Problems

An often-cited similarity between the two men is their labels as populists. They both love to deploy classics in the populism playbook, most notably the tactic of “othering”. Othering enhances the quintessential populist moral claim: only they represent a part of the people. It instigates the scapegoating of excluded groups as “problems” in society – as the primary “threats” the populists will solve for the “people”.

In their tenures, both Duterte and Bukele thrived on “othering” juvenile and deviant behavior as pressing problems only they can solve, for the sake of change. And via violence.

Duterte’s bloody Oplan Tokhang justified wanton brutality against poor drug addicts, exaggerating security threats posed by victims of the narcotics trade. As Kenes cited, Duterte preyed on Filipinos’ security and safety anxieties regarding drug use and drug-related crimes, especially those from Metro Manila and major urban centers.

Bukele capitalized on similar anxieties about gang violence to implement his Territorial Control Plan, a militarization program that capacitated and legitimized law enforcement brutality against street gangs and their poor demographics. Parroting an excessive focus on homicide rates, Bukele steadily normalized the perception of state violence as an effective policy tool to fulfill a manufactured imagination of proper governance.

Notwithstanding slight differences in scapegoats, both men’s populist problem-solving were popular. Massive reductions in crime and homicide rates bolstered support for Bukele leading to his re-election, while Duterte consistently enjoyed high approval ratings. Such success through violence, unfortunately, only incentivized them to tighten their iron fists.

Guns and Handcuffs 

Riding on the popularity of their populist persona and brazen security policies, the two leaders would double down on their platforms harboring carceral and extrajudicial violence. 

Bukele’s anti-gang offensive was institutionalized into a virtually permanent anti-gang emergency decree in March 2022, which has recently been extended for the 24th time. This state of emergency has suspended civil rights and liberties, leading to over 70,000 arbitrary arrests for mere suspicion of affiliation with the notorious MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs.

To house this whopping population of detainees, his administration even erected a mega prison called the Center for Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT). A dystopian beacon of Bukele’s penchant for carceral violence, the 40,000 capacity of this maximum security prison could not even keep pace with the number of Salvadorans handcuffed in the last 2 years.

Not to be outdone, his Filipino parallel ramped up his body count of poor Filipinos throughout his War on Drugs. Official government data parades around 6,252 victims. That is speaking conservatively. And exclusive of underreported vigilante-style killings.

The hail of bullets did not even end with impoverished drug addicts. Using the legitimized violence of the War on Drugs, Duterte would order his military goons to unleash lead upon political opponents, journalists, lawyers, activists, suspected communists, or anyone he branded as his enemy – tantamount now to being an enemy of “the people”.

The COVID-19 pandemic would only provide the two brutal populists with perfect opportunities to cement their reigns of guns and handcuffs. Duterte further legalized his mass-murdering spree with the Anti-Terror Law, while Bukele used public health as cover for his lust for incarceration via “quarantine” in containment centers. All the while, institutional democratic checks and balances were rendered powerless to stop them.

Bukelismo, Dutertismo: One man rule

In 2020, Bukele needed the opposition-controlled Legislative Assembly to approve a 109-million dollar loan for better police and military equipment as part of the Territorial Control Plan. The assembly asked for more transparency. In response, Bukele convened an emergency assembly, occupied the legislative building with heavily armed police and military, and called on his supporters to surround the building to force lawmakers to sign the loan.

The following year, his own Nuevas Ideas party swept the legislative election, winning a supermajority of 56 of the 84 seats. With Bukele now holding the legislature, his party then proceeded to oust 5 judges of the Supreme Court and replaced them with Bukele appointees. By 2021, he has effectively removed all forms of horizontal accountability and evaded Salvadoran checks and balances. Bukele has consolidated power.

As with many things, Bukele does not stray far from Duterte, who was able to achieve a supermajority even at the onset of his term, enabling him to pursue any legislative agenda. In the judiciary, drug war critic Chief Justice Sereno was ousted from her post after a petition by Duterte’s cabinet.

Bukele, like Duterte, consolidated enough power and evaded democratic safeguards to effectively concentrate power upon himself. Controlling both the judiciary and the legislature, Bukele was allowed by the Supreme Court to run for reelection, previously held as unconstitutional, and granted a leave by the Legislative Assembly to campaign. He won with almost 85% of the vote, securing another 5 years, with near-total control over all state institutions.

The Duterte/Bukele Legacy

From their humble origins as political nobodies, Bukele and Duterte have had strikingly similar trajectories of ascension to the national political spotlight. They both boasted promises of change. They scoffed at the traditional elite politician. They both had an itchy trigger against crime. Both Filipinos and Salvadorans placed their faith in a brighter future on their brazen yet refreshing vision of governance.

And unfortunately, their regimes have unabashedly produced legacies of human rights violations. Their visions of governance constituted de facto dictatorships, eroding their countries’ shaky democratic mechanisms. Ultimately, they both merely replaced the criminals and gangs they promised to solve with bloodthirsty counterparts bearing badges and state mandates.

The silver lining of their legacies is that they also produced fierce resistance to authoritarians albeit at the moment mostly against Duterte. Domestically and internationally, more people are after the Philippine punisher’s head. The ICC is gunning to issue an arrest warrant against him, and pressure is mounting on Marcos Jr. to finally hand him to the international guillotine.

For his El Salvador spirit brother, not everyone has proven gullible to his cool crusade against gangs. Despite his re-election, Salvadorans increasingly are feeling the injustices of Bukele’s carceral approach as more of their relatives are unjustly detained, triggering protests despite being banned. International responses, though somewhat weakened, have remained steadfast in their condemnation of the Bukele model.

These strongmen will have their day. When that arrives, their legacies will memorialize who they truly are: international criminals.

“CIDH Visita El Salvador – 2019” by Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos is licensed under CC BY 2.0.