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 also 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. national security official focused on Latin America, said the trajectory is now binary.PUTIN DOUBLES DOWN ON BACKING MADURO AMID MOUNTING US PRESSURE ON VENEZUELA”The way I see it, what comes next will largely depend on what direction this U.S. pressure campaign goes in,” Vigil said. “If it goes in the direction of escalation and conflict, that means there’s going to be very little control — or even less ability to influence what comes next.”The danger, experts say, is not simply a stronger version of Maduro but the rise of armed actors who already control swaths of Venezuelan territory. Vigil said that an uncontrolled collapse could unleash something far more dangerous than the current regime. “You could have someone potentially worse than Maduro,” she said.Jason Marczak, vice president and senior director at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center,…
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