It is often said that we get the leaders we deserve, but no one deserves Nicolás Maduro, least of all the hard-pressed people of Venezuela.

Since his narrow election as president 11 years ago, nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country in response to crippling hyperinflation, soaring crime, dire shortages of food and medicine and a steady erosion of democracy and basic human rights.

Humanitarian experts now fear another mass exodus triggered by the July 28 presidential election, which Maduro claims to have won despite overwhelming evidence that he lost in a landslide.

In an Aug. 22 interview with EWTN Noticias, Cardinal Michael Czerny, prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, decried the tragedy of government-induced “forced migrations” like the one that’s now underway in Venezuela.

“Every forced migrant is a failure of the state … in terms of human rights, development, security, public order … all of the motives that provoke people to flee are the responsibility of the state,” the cardinal noted. “So we ask governments to resolve these problems, because if they don’t, they are losing their most important resource, their people. And that is a very lamentable tragedy.”

Though the United States recognizes opposition candidate Edmundo González as the rightful winner, Maduro has defiantly clung to power. In recent days, Venezuela’s highest court has endorsed the sham results. Meanwhile, Maduro’s leftist government has ominously summoned González for questioning.

Latin America has a long and tragic history of dictatorship: Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in Colombia, the Duvaliers in Haiti, Luis García Meza in Bolivia, Rafael Trujillo in Dominican Republic, and Manuel Noriega in Panama, to name but a few.

Unlike the military rulers of the past who crushed democracy outright, however, today’s autocrats, like Maduro, prefer to co-opt democratic institutions and principles to gain, retain and steadily expand power. Political scientists call this “democratic blending.” As scholar Jose Mauricio Gaona explains: “Once it blends, democracy is no longer a system of government but a tool of maintaining power for a repressive regime.”

When this happens, the Catholic Church — often the last remaining institution capable or courageous enough to speak out in defense of human dignity and freedom — inevitably becomes an enemy of the state.

We see this playing out every day now in Nicaragua, where scores of churches have been closed or desecrated and priests who dare to criticize the regime of President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, are jailed or exiled. In recent days, the government shut down 1,500 nonprofit organizations — including Caritas of Granada and numerous Catholic and evangelical associations — and exiled two more priests.

At the same time, there are worrying anti-democratic developments in Mexico. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has also cracked down on NGOs he doesn’t like, is pushing sweeping constitutional reforms targeting the country’s judicial system.

His plan to replace Mexico’s current judicial appointment process with popular elections for all judgeships at the federal and state level might sound democratic — except for the fact that López Obrador’s Morena party will effectively decide who the candidates are.

While it may be true that such autocratic tendencies run deep in Latin American politics, these same kinds of power grabs seem to be spreading like a virus to all corners of the globe, including here in the United States and other supposed bastions of democracy like the United Kingdom and France, where ruling elites can’t seem to resist the temptation to quell dissent by curtailing free speech.

It’s also important to remember that there is another, even more powerful force ingrained in Latin America’s rich culture: the Catholic faith.

Even as their homelands fall prey to dictators like Maduro, Catholics enduring these hardships know who is really in charge. They also know that the Blessed Mother, to whom they remain fiercely devoted, will never abandon them.

Try as they may, “strongmen” like Maduro can’t hold onto power indefinitely. Just days after his cronies on the Supreme Court overruled the democratic will of the people, Venezuelans who attended Sunday Mass heard the same responsorial Psalm as the rest of us, only with much deeper resonance:

“When the just cry out, the Lord hears them,

and from all their distress he rescues them.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted;

and those who are crushed in spirit he saves” (Psalm 34:17-18).

May God bless you!