QUITO, ECUADOR — Better than most, the people of Latin America know how to spot a caudillo, or populist strongman — Pinochet. Noriega. Castro. Chávez. Perón. Perhaps that helps explain why Latin Americans, who would typically not care very much about the American presidential primary process, have nevertheless been paying such keen attention this year for the first time in memory. Across the continent, Donald Trump has struck a jangly nerve of recognition among people who see something all too familiar in the possibility of a Presidente Trump — an addition to the long line of democratically elected, populist autocrats who have reigned down here for decades. They see up north the rise of a true, North American caudillo.

Here in Quito, the sprawling, capitol city, Ecuadoreans have endured an unusually large number of caudillos, with their familiar style of abrasive politics and revanchist governance. People here often recount their own populist military figures from the 1950s through the ’70s. Or they might tell you about the current president, Rafael Correa, a man fond of bullying reporters and insulting his opponents in a manner reminiscent of El Donaldo.

“One growing parallel between Latin America and the United States: Populism is a product of inequality” — Steve Levitsky, Harvard professor.

I joined a a band of American tourists on a recent trip to Ecuador, where we found otherwise apathetic Ecuadoreans following the primary results of states like Mississippi and Michigan, their eyes glued to television screens, both rapt at and repulsed by the rise of Trump. They were also intrigued by the reasons it might be happening: For all Trump’s bluster about the immigrant threat from Latin America, his popularity in the United States may share a common ancestor with the history of the caudillos who have ruled down here.

“One growing parallel between Latin America and the United States: Populism is a product of inequality,” said Steve Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard who studies authoritarianism in Latin America. Katrina Burgess, a professor of political economy at the Tuft University’s Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy who teaches Latin American history, agreed. “Populism tends to be prevalent in very unequal societies,” Burgess told me. “Latin America is one of the most unequal regions in the world — we’re no longer so far behind, if you look at our Gini coefficient” — the standard metric, developed in 1912, by which countries assess income inequality. In one estimate America’s Gini coefficient is approaching the 45 range — within shouting distance of 50, wheremuch of Latin America still registers.

“I’ve noticed a couple of my Latin American friends feeling that right now. They say maybe the U.S. is turning into another Latin American country,” Burgess said with a laugh.

Scholars, writers and public officials across the continent report that Trump is viewed with horror and fascination by many Latin Americans. They emphasized that Trump has caudillo qualities they way Pinochet had medals: Cult of personality, rage against the elite, unbridled machismo, an acerbic disregard for the rules — coupled with an apparent willingness to break them at nearly any cost.

“Trump is at war with the entire political establishment, and that is a key part of his appeal,” Levitsky told me. “That was also a key part of the appeal of populists going back to Perón in Argentina, to Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa.”

Then, of course, there’s the machismo — which Trump brandishes with the bare-chested subtlety of a Charlton Heston flick.

Burgess said another common ingredient of Trump and the typical caudillo is the ability to summon a “multi-class coalition” — mobilizing support that appears to buck traditional positions of left and right, typically cohering in the working class. In that respect, Burgess said, Trump most resembles Juan Domingo Perón, who served as president of Argentina during the 1940s, ’50s and ’70s. “It just echoes of Trump over and over again.”

Then, of course, there’s the machismo — which Trump brandishes with the bare-chested subtlety of a Charlton Heston flick.

“It’s the strong, male authority, the macho man who’s not afraid of things,” said Pierre Ostiguy, a professor at the Catholic University of Chile who has studied and modeled populist movements across the region (“It applies to Trump like a glove,” he said). Trump may have recently gotten in trouble with certain insinuations of a longitudinal nature, but in caudillo politics, Ostiguy said, “[T]his notion of having balls is really part of the standard of the Latin American populist discourse. Argentina, Ecuador, all over the place. And Donald Trump certainly has it.”

Ostiguy dug through his archives and found a story from 1988, when the sitting president of Brazil campaigned on his “purple balls.” (It remains uncertain what, exactly, that means).

But for many here, Trump’s induction into the caudillo pantheon is affirmed by association; many Ecuadoreans I encountered said they see much of Trump in Correa, who has not hesitated to harass his opponents via Twitter — including, in one memorable tirade, HBO host John Oliver — and whom the Washington Post recently named “Ecuador’s bully.” He once pulled over his motorcade to pigeonhole a teenager who gave him the finger from the sidewalk.

“Correa, he says what people want to hear. That’s what Donald Trump is doing” said Damien, a 29-year-old architect whom I found leaning against his bike in the north of Quito. A few miles away, in La Morita, a 50-year-old clinical psychologist named Desiree concurred. “In temper, Correa is similar to Trump,” she told me over breakfast outdoors as the Andes loomed in the distance. “They share a very weak ego — very easily angered.” (“Correa,” nodded the next woman I met, and then the next: “Correa!” she shouted over the roar of hair dryers in a linoleum, first-floor hair salon.)

In style, if not substance (Correa’s policies have more in common with those of Bernie Sanders than of Trump), they may be right. Levitsky, the Harvard professor, said that — not unlike Chávez, Perón and Trump — Correa “is truly at war with the entire political elite.”

“Take the speeches from Correa and Donald Trump — take away who’s making [the] quote,” said John Dunn, a politics professor at Universidad San Francisco de Quito. “They say practically the same thing, the same stuff.”

Our travelling band of American expatriates had found ourselves, unwittingly, in the Land of a Thousand Trumps. “Ecuador is the country with greatest number of high-level populists,” Ostiguy told me, adding later that Argentina might contest the prize for longest populist tradition. “But [Ecuadoreans], they live with that all the time,” Ostiguy said. “What they’re telling Americans is: Welcome to our world. Get used to it.”

To that end, academics I spoke with seem to relish the challenge of identifying Trump’s doppelganger from history. Was it Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic (slaughtered 20,000 Haitians); Manuel Zelaya of Honduras (ran roughshod over his country’s Supreme Court); José Velasco Ibarra of Ecuador (following a “Glorious Revolution,” became the Supreme Chief of the Republic); Guillermo Rodríguez Lara, also of Ecuador (took power in a military coup; lost power in a military coup); or Alberto Fujimori of Peru (convicted of murdering leftists by death squad)? It is a formidable rabbit hole of blurry, black-and-white images, diminutive generals festooned with tacky gold and oversized epaulettes.

But the region’s more modern antecedents might offer better comparisons to Trump — a line of recent presidents whose populist campaigns and democratic victories led to a raft of constitutional abuses in their home countries. Writing in Foreign Policy on March 16, Javier Corrales argued that the region has seen 13 people since 1989 run for president as quasi-populist outsiders and win. Some — like Peru’s Fujimori, Venezuela’s Chávez, Colombia’s Álvaro Uribe and Correa — found aggressive (if not creative) ways to amend the constitution to extend their terms. Bolivia’s Evo Morales has tried and failed to do the same. And Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, has pushed institutional limits far enough to invite a significant backlash.

Even with a sizable pool from which to draw, our informal straw poll found a clear consensus for first prize: Abdalá Bucaram, the former president of Ecuador. Bucaram served for eight months, until he was declared by Congress to be mentally incapable to rule in 1997. Known as “El Loco” — a name Bucaram himself brandished with pride — the ill-fated president was a populist sensation, dancing onstage with teenage girls and recording a rock album during his short stint in office. Bucaram’s nephew, Santiago, readily conceded the comparison, in an interview over the phone: “Trump and my uncle were very similar.”

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Trump is lacking one crucial attribute of the caudillo, however. Most Latin American caudillos have been charismatic and inspire rapturous loyalty and unqualified devotion, at least at first. But nobody here — to a soul — could say they even liked Trump, nor did they know anyone who did. Ecuador is estimated to be in the top 10 countries of origin for undocumented immigrants in the United States; locals in Quito suggested it is likely Trump’s comments on American immigration policy had done a number on his reputation. He seems to have earned public opprobrium in Ecuador approaching the level of a universal demographic phenomenon.

“Apocalyptic,” muttered one engineering student, in his living room. “Fascista,” snarled a middle-aged woman over breakfast. “The King of Assholes!” shouted one Millennial, a civil engineer, on the street. “Disgusting — like my ex-boyfriend,” groaned a college girl. “An Anaranjado,” chuckled one young woman — an “Orange Man.” Deep inside the dim, candle-lit halls of a 16th century cathedral, a dark-eyed man leaned in, lowering his voice to a breathy confession: “Satán,” he whispered, eyes wide.

The antipathy is a toxic brew of perceived bullying and domestic exasperation. “After roughly a century of U.S. intervention in Latin American, many were quite sensitive to U.S. bullying,” said Levitsky, who pointed out that George W. Bush was far tamer yet equally despised here. But in a few conversations there lurked a barely restrained schadenfreude over the idea that Americans — after decades of supporting Latin American dictators — were perhaps getting a taste of their own populist medicine.

Caudillo, like populism, remains a nebulous label. “The line between an electoral democracy and authoritarian regime can be tricky to find,” cautioned Burgess, the Latin American scholar at Fletcher. Beginning in the 1920s, populist politics rapidly gained currency as a mobilizing force in nascent Latin American democracies, reaching ascendance with Brazil’s Getúlio Vargas in the 1930s and Bolivia’s Victor Paz Estenssoro in the 1950s. But perhaps the most lasting legacy on the region came in the form of Peronism — the personalismo ideology of Perón.

“Perón is one of the most paradigmatic populists,” said Burgess. “I’ve raised this many times, talking about populism and populist leaders, their style of campaigning and governing.” Could Trump win a Latin-American election? “I think with his style, absolutely,” Burgess said. “But the content [of his policies] would inevitably have to be different.”

Our party had set out to diagnose the causes of Ecuador’s Trump Obsession, but soon enough we were beginning to feel the telltale symptoms of overexposure. In nearly every conversation, curious Quitoans volleyed questions about Trump back at us, expecting answers. Salvation arrived in the form of a three-hour drive to the rainforest. Or so we thought. Saddled behind the wheel of a rickety SUV for the daylong expedition, a young Argentinean, Ramero, took shotgun. “You’re Americans?” Ramero exclaimed in broken English. “What is going on with Trump, man?”

Trump may be redefining the rules of the road for American tourists in Latin America, just as he’s doing for American voters in North America. “They all want to ask about it,” said Sarah Dorfman, a 20-year-old Boston University student studying abroad. “I think they’re horrified.”

Increasingly, so were we. Whatever humor was retained from the exercise — not to mention whatever remained of our nationalist pride — it had all begun to wear thin, probably around the third Noriega comparison. The earnestness of their shock felt like an antiseptic, they were strangers from another continent who sounded more worried than we were.

Trump may well be the first populist of the modern era — perhaps since William Jennings Bryan in 1896.

On our last day in Quito, I asked a young man, Beto, if he followed the American elections. “You mean Trump, right?” he replied. Beto, an advertising copywriter, opened his laptop to show me a video he and his friends had been circulating lately, in which a video blogger dissects how Trump answers (or doesn’t answer) policy questions. “Trump’s style would certainly succeed here,” Beto said, shaking his head. Indeed, Correa recently predicted that a Trump victory would revitalize left-wing populism across the continent — what’s good for the caudillo goose, perhaps.

If Trump’s ascendance felt reminiscent of a caudillo coup, there may be a larger irony involved. Trump may well be the first populist of the modern era — perhaps since William Jennings Bryan in 1896. If that proves to be the case, then the country’s Latin-American migrants, now Trump’s most feral bêtes noires, have not only the most to lose from Trump’s nomination, but also the most to impart: hardscrabble lessons of an auxiliary civic tradition we might only just now be learning, to put it generously, the hard way.

“Populism is one of the worst diseases we have in South America,” Damien, the young architect, told me as he swung his bicycle helmet upward and snapped the clasps under his chin, one foot on the pedal, just before he took off. “You could say you were going to get a little bit of what we’ve had many years ago.”

One could argue that the best course of action is to build a wall. Or, one might argue, it’s to listen more closely to those on the other side.

Ben Wofford is a researcher at POLITICO Magazine. Aaron Mak and Isabelle Taft contributed reporting.