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As the Trump administration escalates pressure on Venezuela, experts warn that Nicolás Maduro’s downfall could open the door to a successor “even worse” than the dictator himself and unleash a landscape dominated by drug cartels, guerrilla factions and armed warlords who have embedded themselves across Venezuela for decades.

Venezuela today is less a centralized dictatorship and more a patchwork of criminal territories controlled by cartels, Colombian insurgents and regime-aligned militias. Analysts told Fox News Digital that U.S. policy now confronts not only Maduro but an entrenched ecosystem of non-state armed groups that could seize power in a post-Maduro vacuum.

Roxanna Vigil, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former U.S. n

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