After Maduro: Who Actually Controls Venezuela’s Underworld?
Maduro's capture exposed a patronage network where generals, guerrillas, and gangs operated semi-autonomously. World of Crime examines what happens next for the ELN, Tren de Aragua and more.
On January 2, U.S. military forces captured Nicolás Maduro in a raid on the Miraflores Palace in Caracas. Within hours, the Venezuelan president was facing a 56-page federal indictment charging him with drug trafficking, narco-terrorism, and conspiracy to flood American streets with cocaine. The indictment describes a criminal enterprise allegedly spanning the Colombian border and Caribbean transshipment routes, involving Venezuelan generals, drug cartels, guerrilla groups, and armed gangs operating with regime protection.
But the indictment did not make the subtle reality of organized crime in Venezuela under Maduro.
Maduro’s capture creates a power vacuum not within a single organization, but across a decentralized patronage system. For more than a decade, Venezuelan generals, governors, and military commanders have operated increasingly autonomous criminal enterprises within their territorial zones. Meanwhile, Colombian guerrilla group, the ELN, controls cocaine production and mining in border states under implicit military tolerance. Tren de Aragua, born in a regime-protected prison, now operates across half a dozen countries. The Cartel de los Soles, meanwhile, is not a cartel at all, but a label for the criminal structures embedded within Venezuela’s military and security apparatus that enabled or supervised the rest.
Within hours of Maduro’s capture, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as Acting President for a 90-day interim period. Trump has already threatened her with a fate “worse than Maduro” if she does not comply with American demands.
The open question is whether Rodríguez can command the same obedience from Venezuela’s criminal underworld.
In this report, World of Crime examines how this fragmented ecosystem responds to Maduro’s removal, focusing on the ELN’s territorial control along the border, Tren de Aragua’s transnational trafficking networks, and the military-embedded structures grouped under Cartel de los Soles.
