These Philadelphians lived under authoritarian rule. As Trump takes power, their stories should serve as cautionary tales.

The teenager — who was all of 16 or 17 at the time — would spot the soldiers coming from afar. They were always armed, often angry, and usually squeezed elbow to elbow into dusty, clattering, olive green trucks rumbling toward Manuel Portillo’s neighborhood in Guatemala City.

The reason for their sudden appearance was anyone’s guess.

But whenever Portillo saw them, he would jump on his bicycle like Guatemala’s own Paul Revere, warning neighbors of impending danger.

Portillo is 64 now, and after living under a succession of military dictators in his homeland in the 1970s and ’80s, he works at the Welcoming Center, an immigrant support agency in Chinatown — where he can see a distressingly familiar threat looming on the horizon.

Unlike some listeners, when Donald Trump said during the presidential campaign that he’d be a dictator on Day One, Portillo didn’t shrug it off. He and other immigrants who came to Philadelphia to escape authoritarian regimes in their home countries have lived the old saying, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

And — this bears constant repeating — Trump has shown us who he is.

Since his reelection, many of us are walking around holding our breaths, wondering what’s next. So I wanted to talk to Portillo and others like him who’ve lived under repressive governments to help ground what can often be abstract conversations about the dismantling of democracy.

After all, it is easy to dismiss those discussions as hyperbole or wish them away with an, “Oh, that could never happen here.” But in speaking with nearly a dozen immigrants who have lived under dictatorships, three truths emerged:

Dictators usually don’t appear unannounced — they almost always show you who they are.

Life under authoritarian regimes can often feel deceptively mundane: Babies are born. Loved ones are buried. Bills need to be paid. Lives are lived the best they can be.

And there is usually a chilling and abrupt moment in which the ruler exerts their power and nothing is the same, as when soldiers serving under Gen. Fernando Romeo Lucas García targeted Portillo’s family and “disappeared” several relatives, including his father and 2-year-old sister.

Even Portillo admitted that he wants to believe America is different.

“If this was happening in some other country, I think it would be much easier to imagine,” Portillo said. “But to believe that can happen in this country, you know, it’s still hard.”

Hard but hardly impossible. If the president-elect makes good on his promises — including using the military for mass deportations of immigrants — we may all witness scenes that look uncomfortably like a military dictatorship’s disappearances.

Trump has insisted he is after criminals — but even putting aside his obsession with thousands of mythical murderous migrants roaming our streets, what we need to remember is that one of the consequences of authoritarianism is the indiscriminate abuse of power.

One group is a target today. Another group will always be the target tomorrow.

So imagine that olive green truck driving down Broad Street looking for your neighbors: the man with the calloused hands waiting for the bus every morning, the young couple raising their family in the rowhouse around the corner, the cook at your favorite neighborhood restaurant.

You.

And then consider how perilously we may be inching toward that reality.

Unless you’ve lived under a dictator, “you wouldn’t know,” Portillo said of the arc of authoritarianism that chips away at freedoms until there are few, if any, left.

“And by the time you realize, it will be too late.”

It’s a jarring observation, especially for Americans who have become comfortable in our perceived exceptionalism, blissfully uninterested and unaware of just how fragile democracy can be — and is — in so many parts of the world.

“We’re in for a rude awakening,” said Danilo Burgos.

Burgos, the first Dominican elected to serve in the Pennsylvania General Assembly, grew up hearing stories about the brutality inflicted on the island’s people during the long dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. The memories would often reduce his grandfather to tears.

Jimmy Duran, a business consultant who lives in East Falls, was a high school student when he made the connection between the vivid stories told and retold by grandparents who lived in the Dominican Republic under Trujillo and the dry lessons in his history books.

“They talked about Trujillo in school today,” Duran would tell his grandfather José, eliciting a flurry of new stories from the elder Duran.

Among the stories not in the textbooks was how Duran’s uncle, a rural police officer like his grandfather, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for not obeying an order to kill a lawyer for writing critically of the regime. And how his grandfather was forced to flee with his family to be spared a similar, or worse, fate.

And then there is Olena Hart, 38, a writer who emigrated from Ukraine in 2015 and who carries with her the generational trauma of authoritarianism she may not have experienced firsthand, but which has nonetheless left deep scars.

The intentional starvation of the Ukrainian people, known as Holodomor, occurred in the early 1930s, but the experience so colored her family’s life that even as a wife and mother living in suburban Pennsylvania in 2024, Hart still can’t bring herself to throw out old leftovers for fear of going hungry.

Back in Chinatown, Portillo told me that when he fled Guatemala’s armed internal conflict in the 1980s, seeking sanctuary from violence and human rights abuses, he couldn’t take much with him. But what he and others who fled countries controlled by authoritarianism internalized is the instinct to make themselves invisible — to survive in the shadows even while resisting in all manner of ways, including jumping on that bicycle to warn family and friends.

“There is no formula for resistance,” said Clemencia Rodríguez, a professor at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication who has studied civilian communities that live under authoritarian control. Instead, she said, dissent comes in various forms — from public protests to underground literary publications to political graffiti — and at all volumes.

It’s understandable. For many living under authoritarian conditions, there is often no choice but to be careful, to quietly resist — especially when loud resistance could be met with brutality and death.

But for the most part, that is not our reality in the United States — at least not yet.

For now, we can and should be as loud with our dissent as possible. It is our right, our obligation, our duty to one another.

For Duran, being quiet is not an option — neither is running away. To him, Trump’s threat to democracy is very real, but the results of the presidential election show too many Americans are ignoring what’s at stake.

“It needs to look like taking the political process, the democratic system that we have, way, way, way more serious,” he said. “We need to appreciate it. We need to value it, and we need to own it and participate in it like our lives depend on it.”

That’s a call to action I can get behind. Democracy: Value it, own it, take part in it. Protect it — with all of our might. And maybe most important of all: Don’t disregard the warnings of people who’ve watched it disappear, slowly at first and then suddenly, into the night.