Mayor Rodrigo Duterte inspects the assault rifle of Senior Inspector Ronald Dela Rosa (L) after inspecting a crime scene in the village of Tamugan in Davao city in the southern Philippines. Looking on is Davao Police Chief Isidro Lapena (2nd, R). Picture taken in 1997. REUTERS/Renato Lumawag

By Manuel Mogato, Karen Lema, David Lague and Neil Jerome Morales

DAVAO (Reuters) - Rodrigo Duterte has kept his word.

"Forget the laws on human rights," he declared in May at his final presidential campaign rally in Manila. "If I make it to the presidential palace, I will do just as I did as mayor. You drug pushers, hold-up men and do-nothings, you better go out. Because, I'd kill you."

More than seven months after winning the presidency, Duterte is rolling out on a national scale the model of government he honed over 22 years and seven terms as mayor of this city on the southern island of Mindanao. Just as in Davao, blood is now flowing in the capital Manila and surrounding areas as the police and vigilantes, inspired by the president, conduct a wave of killings.

A Davao-based human rights group, the Coalition Against Summary Execution (CASE), has compiled figures showing that death squads in the city were responsible for at least 1,400 documented killings between 1998 and 2015. Scaled up, Duterte's war on drugs is now well under way across the nation, and the body count is setting records.

Police have killed more than 2,000 people since he was inaugurated on June 30, and are investigating about 3,000 more deaths. Human rights monitors believe many of these were carried out by vigilantes with official sanction, a charge the government denies.

In Davao, Duterte built a personality cult around his crackdown on crime. Part Mao, part Castro, part gun-toting Filipino warlord, the avowedly socialist mayor ruled his city as a lethal enemy of wrongdoers and a champion of the poor. His salute was a clenched fist – a symbol now emblazoned on souvenir mugs and other Duterte memorabilia.

But there is another ingredient in Duterte's appeal that makes him a more complex leader, and a potentially more potent one, than is appreciated abroad: The people of Davao say he gets things done. Residents laud his handling of city services. Businesses praise his pro-growth policy. A top official at the American Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines applauds his team of economic advisers.

Samuel R. Matunog, a Davao lawyer, businessman and human rights worker, strongly rejects Duterte's support for violence and killing. But he acknowledges there are elements of his administration worthy of support. "There are so many things that he does that I like," he says. "Most important to him is the basic welfare of working people."

With the national levers of power in his grasp, Duterte is trying to apply to the Philippines, a nation of 101 million people, the same recipe of fear and populism that he employed in his efforts to tame Davao, a city of 1.6 million.

'A BIGGER DAVAO CITY'

To advance the drug war, his political allies have introduced legislation to bring back the death penalty – and to lower the age at which people can be prosecuted for crimes to just 9. Meanwhile, he is promising a raft of measures certain to please wage earners and the poor – including free tuition at state universities and colleges, and free irrigation for rice farmers. He also wants to replicate features of the Cuban health system.

The task of managing the more than $300 billion national economy dwarfs any challenge Duterte faced in Davao, to be sure. While his war on drugs is well advanced, his promised economic reforms have barely started.

"He wants to make the Philippines a bigger Davao City," Jesus Dureza, one of Duterte's closest advisers, said in an interview on the president's plan to boost the economy by eliminating crime and drugs. "But the work is much tougher as corruption and crime are well-entrenched in Manila, at the national level."

As president, Duterte is continuing his take-no-prisoners approach.

In Davao, he shamed civil servants on a weekly radio and television program. In Manila, he has publicly humiliated his most outspoken critic, a senator who led an investigation into extrajudicial killings and now faces criminal charges. And he recently demanded the immediate resignation of the heads of the country's top energy regulatory body after reports of corruption at the agency.

In his crackdown on drugs and crime as mayor, most victims were drug users, petty criminals and street children. Most were either shot or stabbed to death in vigilante-style killings, CASE said.