A U. S. -Mexico coordinated operation is not what killed one of the most recognizable figures in Mexico’s drug war. On October 30, 2016, roughly 70 Mexican soldiers surrounded a home in the Los Cintas neighborhood of Culiacán after gunfire was reported nearby.
Before the confrontation ended, three senior members of Los Antrax — the Sinaloa cartel’s elite enforcement unit — were dead, including a man authorities identified as René Velázquez Valenzuela, better known as “El Sarento Phoenix. ”
Inside the cartel and among Mexican federal intelligence, Velázquez was widely referred to as “the Osama bin Laden of the Sinaloa cartel. ” The comparison was visual and cultural, not ideological. With his shaved head, thick beard, and black tactical clothing, he projected an image that echoed the al-Qaeda leader in photographs that circulated widely across social media and narcocorrido culture.
Velázquez’s rise was not the product of cartel lineage. A former truck driver from Sinaloa with no family ties to the upper hierarchy, he reportedly entered the organization in 2008 through its founding structure. He was assigned the code name L3 and designated chief of sicarios, making him responsible for training the unit’s killers and coordinating armed operations. Los Antrax was created in 2008 as a direct response to an internal crisis.
That January, Alfredo Beltrán Leyva was arrested by Mexican federal authorities. His brothers blamed El Chapo Guzmán for the arrest and severed ties with the Sinaloa cartel, launching a war against their former allies. Within months, El Chapo’s 22-year-old son, Edgar Guzmán López, was killed outside a shopping center in Culiacán. For Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the cartel’s quiet organizational architect, that fracture created an urgent security problem.
His sons were embedded in cartel operations and now faced threats from a former partner who knew the organization’s internal structure intimately. The unit he ordered built, named after the anthrax bacterium, was designed as a paramilitary force to protect his family and assert dominance over Culiacán’s criminal landscape. Velázquez’s defining moment came early. On February 25, 2008, he and the unit’s commander, José Rodrigo Aréchiga Gamboa, known as “El Chino Antrax,” encountered Mexican army soldiers in Culiacán.
A firefight broke out. According to the documented account, Velázquez walked directly toward federal soldiers with a grenade in each hand, drawing their attention and giving El Chino time to escape. Once his commander was clear, Velázquez surrendered. He was sent to the Aguaruto prison in Culiacán and served most of a six-year sentence.
Prison did not separate him from organized crime. Intelligence sources alleged that while incarcerated he assumed a leadership role among inmates and reportedly controlled Module 5, the sector holding Sinaloa-affiliated prisoners. He used social media from behind bars, posting images of himself walking the prison yard with an entourage, smoking marijuana, and receiving visits from cartel associates. Despite telling prosecutors he planned to reintegrate into society as a delivery driver, Velázquez returned directly to Los Antrax as second in command when he walked out of Aguaruto on August 22, 2014.
His release coincided with the arrest of El Chino Antrax, who was detained by Dutch police at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport on December 30, 2013. With the unit’s founding commander gone, Velázquez became its acknowledged operational leader. The unit’s operations were documented through multiple channels. According to U.
S. Treasury Department designations and law enforcement assessments, Los Antrax fought the Beltrán Leyva organization and was in sustained conflict with Los Zetas. Following the March 2009 arrest of Vicente Zambada Niebla, one of El Mayo’s sons, the cartel instructed Velázquez to establish a network of scouts across Culiacán municipality to monitor law enforcement movements. He reportedly ran that intelligence operation from inside his prison cell.
The human cost of the unit’s activities was staggering. In May 2011, the Mexican army engaged three Los Antrax members in southern Culiacán, killing all three and liberating kidnapping victims, including a woman, a man whose toes and ears had been mutilated, and a five-year-old girl. Postmortem examinations indicated the three gunmen had been beaten and tortured before death, contradicting the official account of a firefight. In November 2011, gunmen killed Francisco Aréchiga Rubio, one of the unit’s senior founding members, during an indoor soccer game.
By 2015 and 2016, the Sinaloa cartel was navigating its most turbulent period. El Chapo escaped from the maximum-security Altiplano prison in July 2015 through a tunnel dug into his cell. He was recaptured in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, on January 8, 2016, after an intelligence operation tracked him through his communications. His recapture reshaped the cartel’s internal balance, deepening the divide between factions aligned with El Mayo and those aligned with El Chapo’s sons, Los Chapitos.
At 4 a. m. on October 30, 2016, a convoy of approximately 70 Mexican army soldiers in at least 15 vehicles was moving through Culiacán in response to reports of armed men. As the convoy moved, soldiers overheard gunfire near the Ninth Military Zone.
They rerouted toward the sound and arrived at a home in the Los Cintas neighborhood, where several senior members of Los Antrax were gathered. The confrontation became immediate fire. Some members attempted to flee in vehicles; others escaped across rooftops. A red Toyota moved along Miguel Hidalgo Street with occupants firing on soldiers.
The firefight lasted 30 minutes, with two armored vehicles arriving as reinforcements. When it was over, three men were dead, three were injured, and three were detained. The army seized five assault rifles, one fragmentation grenade, and ten vehicles, at least one of which was armored. Shell casings from AK-47s and other assault rifles were scattered across the scene.
Velázquez was identified almost immediately by his shaved head and long beard. He was found inside one of the vehicles, dead from gunshot wounds. A colleague known as “El Calli,” described as another key figure within Los Antrax, was also confirmed dead. The PGR identified Velázquez as El Sarento Phoenix, second in command of Los Antrax and acting head of its assassination operations.
The official account described a military patrol that encountered a cartel gathering through a chain of rerouted responses to unrelated gunfire. Anonymous reporting from Culiacán in the days that followed told a different story. Sources claimed the army had received a specific tip from inside the organization itself. The name circulated in those reports was Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, one of El Chapo’s sons.
The backstory reportedly ran through El Chino Antrax. At least two years before that October morning, El Chino and Iván Archivaldo had a serious falling out at a bar in Sinaloa. The nature of the dispute was never officially documented, but the tension between Los Chapitos and the Zambada-aligned leadership of Los Antrax was consistent with the broader fracturing inside the cartel following El Chapo’s recapture. Eliminating the leadership of the unit most loyal to El Mayo would be strategically logical.
There is also the possibility, never officially confirmed but widely reported, that Velázquez was not at the Los Cintas gathering when the confrontation began. He may have been in a different neighborhood, Guadalupe, and radio communications suggested members of Los Antrax called him to the scene to bring reinforcements after soldiers had already arrived. One theory circulated that he and his men engaged the army to cover the escape of El Mayo’s son, Ismael Zambada Sicairos, known as “El Flaco. ”
If accurate, that would mean the last act of El Sarento Phoenix’s life mirrored the first defining act of his career: moving toward federal forces to buy time for the people he served.
None of these accounts have been officially confirmed. No arrests or charges related to an alleged betrayal have materialized in the public record. On November 1, 2016, authorities released Velázquez’s body to his family. A wake was held at a home in El Salado, a rural community in Culiacán municipality.
The coffin was white, cost 35,000 pesos, and was covered in flowers from his wife, daughters, and a friend identified in press coverage as “El Changito. ” Narcocorridos played. He was buried in the Panteón El Salado, his mausoleum decorated with statues of demons, portraits of fallen associates, a Virgin surrounded by skulls, and bottles of tequila. The unit did not survive him.
The losses had been compounding for years. Rely Castro, “El Poo Antrax,” was killed in a shootout with the Beltrán Leyva cartel in Tubutama, Sonora, in June 2010. Three members were killed by the army in May 2011. Francisco Aréchiga Rubio was assassinated at the soccer game in November 2011.
Roque Antrax died in February 2012. El Chino Antrax was arrested in December 2013, extradited to the United States, released to house arrest in 2020, and murdered in Culiacán on May 15, 2020, alongside his sister and brother-in-law, less than three months after walking free. By the mid-2010s, what remained of Los Antrax had essentially folded into other Sinaloa-aligned structures operating in the Culiacán area. Reporting suggested surviving members merged with a group known as Los Quimales.
The name, structure, and hierarchy of numerical code names effectively dissolved. El Chapo’s extradition in January 2017 removed the cartel’s most globally recognized figure. His trial in the Eastern District of New York from 2018 to 2019 produced testimony from cooperating witnesses, including Vicente Zambada Niebla, that laid the organization’s structure bare in federal court. By July 2024, El Mayo Zambada himself was in American federal custody, reportedly lured onto a plane in Mexico and flown directly to the United States, triggering a wave of unprecedented violence across Sinaloa.
The broader pattern matters. The mythologization of cartel figures through narcocorridos, social media, and online video has created a genre of celebrity that runs parallel to the documented historical record. The songs produced about El Sarento Phoenix described a man of almost superhuman violence and unshakable loyalty. The photographs showed a figure inhabiting a world of total power.
The narcocorrido does not capture the six years in a prison module, the arrest, or the possibility that he drove toward a military confrontation because someone inside his own organization had already told the army where to find him. El Sarento Phoenix did not rise from the ashes. He was buried in El Salado in a mausoleum decorated with the imagery of a world that had consumed him. The loyalty that defined his reputation made him useful to the people above him because it made him a resource they could spend.
In the end, even the most recognizable face in the Sinaloa cartel became just another name on the list of the dead.