Hero or Traitor: the Fall of the Military Captain Who Caught ‘El Z40’

This story is that of a fallen hero with an expected ending. A sailor who fulfilled one of the most urgent and dangerous missions for the country, but instead of receiving a medal, he was given a cell in a military prison. An Icarus who flew too close to the sun that his wings melted.

For years, Mexico has failed—me included—an exemplary sailor, but in a few days, this damage can be repaired: decreeing the recognition of innocence and the annulment of the sentence of frigate captain Raúl Sánchez Labrada, key to the 2013 arrest of one of the most wanted criminals in the history of drug trafficking in Mexico and the United States.

This is the life of the soldier Sánchez Labrada, as told by himself from Military Prison Number 1-A, where he served an initial 22-year sentence.

In the first year of Enrique Peña Nieto’s six-year term, the security cabinet launched its pacification plan: arrest or kill 122 “priority targets.” The idea was that if authorities managed to neutralize these generators of violence, organized crime would be left headless and the rest of the force would collapse. The “war on drugs” launched under Felipe Calderón would end, according to the PRI, with a few precise, poisoned darts.

There were other, smaller ones on that list. The pulp of evil. Former Secretary of the Interior Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong called them “The Damned Ten,” a dozen extremely violent masterminds and masterminds behind the country’s worst tragedies: El Mayo, El Chapo, La Tuta, and, among them, El Z40 or Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales, a forty-something Nuevo Laredo native who led Los Zetas with his brother Omar, Z42. The arrest of both was urgent for Mexico and the United States after the massacre in Allende, Coahuila.

To arrest those ten damned men, state or federal police were not enough. The cartels were paramilitarized, and specialized groups from the Armed Forces were needed to confront them. The marines, due to their elite training, became the Mexican government’s natural choice to carry out these missions, which many considered suicidal.

In 2013, a sailor arrived in Monclova, Coahuila, to support the mission: Captain Raúl Sánchez Labrada, whose reputation preceded him. He had taken courses in the United States and Guatemala. He had a reputation for being tough and incorruptible from his time in ports and customs. Now he was in the birthplace of Altos Hornos de México, searching for clues to catch El Z40. The problem was that Monclova had been a region silenced since Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, El Z3, settled there. Fear was stifling. No one spoke to the authorities.

Labrada then devised a strategy: create a citizen reporting program that would only be responded to by the Naval Operations Base of the Navy Secretariat under his command and that would be supported by the local National Chamber of Commerce in Monclova, which would reward informants who provided a verifiable result with household appliances.

The plan paid off when a member of Los Zetas began leaking internal information. That informant was given the nickname JEPA3, and Sánchez Labrada offered him a five million dollar reward from the DEA if he continued to provide hard, verifiable information about Z40. Thus, he achieved what no one else had ever achieved: locating the route and hideout of the Los Zetas leader in Anáhuac, Nuevo León.

“For the first time, the government now had a place to start the hunt for Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales,” he says excitedly, as if the adrenaline had never left his body and reappears with every memory in this prison.

Thus began the operation to capture Z40 in Anáhuac, Nuevo León.

Sitting at a cement table in Military Prison 1, within Military Camp Number 1-A in Naucalpan, State of Mexico, the captain calmly sips a coffee and scratches to explain his life. The ream of papers comes out of a folder containing the evidence of his innocence. All of it is duly laminated, organized, and neat. A reflection of a life of military discipline.

“But I’ll explain that to you now, because my current life can’t be understood without what happened in 2013: the arrest, without gunfire, without violence, without collateral damage as it should be, with intelligence work,” says Raúl Sánchez Labrada, continuing to narrate, scratch, and remember.

After locating his target, the captain requested a transfer to the municipal capital of Anáhuac, where the Navy had a temporary base of operations to continue his mission; however, his untimely arrival could raise suspicions. His superiors recommended that he instead arrive in Colombia, a border community that is part of the municipality of Anáhuac.

There, he assembled the intelligence gathered by his team and what was leaked by JEPA3: their information revealed that El Z40 had a daughter who was barely eight months old in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, and to see her, he traveled along the routes of Anáhuac, Colombia, and Nuevo Laredo. A kind of Bermuda Triangle, where Los Zetas disappeared people at will.

According to the most recent Urban Public Security Survey, regarding the population that feels insecure,

To make his capture more difficult, there was a suspicion that the head of the Anáhuac municipal police, Captain Alfredo Grande Barrera (now retired), was on the cartel’s payroll and was thwarting any arrest attempts. Furthermore, El Z40 used a modified, high-tech Blackberry cell phone that, when used in Nuevo León or Tamaulipas, bounced the signal all the way to the State of Mexico. They had to make their way blindly, with the enemy at home.

The disadvantage for the marines was obvious: limited personnel, few vehicles, and outdated photos of Z40 and his brother, who had undergone facial surgery to make themselves unrecognizable. Despite everything, Sánchez Labrada and his team continued investigating until their best opportunity arose: on Sunday, July 14, 2013, JEPA3 alerted that Miguel Ángel Treviño was about to leave his hideout in Anáhuac for Nuevo Laredo. He was believed to be unarmed, with only his driver and accountant. The opportunity was unbeatable.

There was just one problem: Treviño had two routes to see his newborn daughter. He could arrive through Colombia or directly to Nuevo Laredo. Labrada decided to take the risk. A coin toss, heads or tails. He launched the operation with an alert coordinated with the Navy’s operations base in Nuevo Laredo:

“Get the Black Hawk helicopter ready, we’re going hunting,” said the captain.

Z40 escaped once again in a pickup truck along a fenced path.

“I immediately gathered my personnel and told them it was a mission with a high risk of confrontation, so we would take 80% of the base’s support weapons. I would only use two trucks, and I could fit 15 personnel in total. I decided to omit a nurse to maximize space, I would use the first-aid kit thanks to my knowledge of basic trauma life support.

“In the end, I told them we were going after El Z40 and that I would only take volunteers; anyone who wasn’t sure about this, shouldn’t go; “To my surprise, there were more volunteers than I needed,” says Sánchez Labrada, who hasn’t taken a bite of the donut to continue his story.

The official version of the arrest of the Los Zetas leader states that, on the morning of July 15, 2013, El Z40 was traveling relaxedly through his own Bermuda Triangle until he came to a fork in a rural, linear road known as La Gasera and chose the left path. That trivial decision, to save five minutes on his way to his destination, led him directly to a military checkpoint set up by personnel from the Nuevo Laredo naval operations base.

Sánchez Labrada’s version is slightly different: on July 14, the day before, at noon, the manhunt began based on information from the witness. His intuition told him to keep an eye on the route, especially La Gasera, a trail that has three sections of lines separated by padlocked fences that El Z40 opened and closed as he advanced to make it difficult for the suspects to escape. They continued. The fences were so strong that even crashing an armored vehicle wouldn’t break them. A key to open the locks or a large bolt cutter were needed.

While keeping watch, the captain received valuable information from Commander Tigre, in charge of all the Navy’s temporary operating bases: Z40 and his two companions were traveling through La Gasera, which had only one entrance and exit. The Marines and Zetas were, unbeknownst to them, only a few meters away.

“We reached the first fence and they were already ahead of us. We accelerated and reached the second, but they beat us again. We crashed the truck into the third and got stuck. I went out to look for them on foot. We were three kilometers from the end of the La Gasera road. We had them at our fingertips.”

“At that moment, the Black Hawk arrived and landed overhead. We realized from the helicopter’s radio communication that two pickup trucks were coming. The pilot made a random decision: to intercept only one, a silver one with Coahuila license plates. The second truck fled, and we never found it,” he recalls.

The frigate captain ran to the intercepted vehicle and found three surrendered men. To their surprise, one of them announced that the pilot had made the wrong decision: that Z40 had escaped in the second truck. He claimed to be a mere bodyguard. 

The commander whose head the Z40 had put a price on.

The detained men were taken to a ranch in Nuevo Laredo. Old photographs and plastic surgery complicated their full identification; intelligence personnel needed time to corroborate whether they were, in fact, mere drivers, accountants, and bodyguards before handing them over to the federal prosecutor’s office.

While the investigation raced against time, Sánchez Labrada felt a bittersweet feeling: he had arrested three important Los Zetas leaders who could be used to strike a second major blow against the organization, but El Z40 had escaped for the umpteenth time.

In charge of the interrogation was the commander of the operations base with the most resources in terms of vehicles and operational personnel, known as “Salvador,” who held the record for killing the most Zetas members in northeastern Mexico. He was so lethal that El Z40 himself had offered 300,000 pesos to whoever killed him. The capo was terrified of him, thirsty for revenge, and put a price on his head.

Suddenly, Sánchez Labrada remembered a crucial piece of information. JEPA3 had told him that Z40 was using a fake Kansas City Southern railroad ID, calling himself David Estrada Coronado; a fact only the captain knew. He immediately asked for the bodyguard’s wallet to check.

“I came in shouting: It’s him! It’s him! David Estrada Coronado is El Z40!” he recalls excitedly. “I imagine he was so afraid of ‘Salvador,’ that he was going to kill him or do something to his family, that suddenly the detainee extended his arms with his hands cuffed and opened one hand.

And suddenly he surrendered: ‘I’m Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales, I want to negotiate!’”

Captain Sánchez Labrada received a reward that became a punishment.

Z40 couldn’t negotiate anything even with all his millions of dollars. With his identity confirmed, he was flown to Mexico City and then transported by land to the Altiplano maximum security prison in the State of Mexico. His solitary confinement cell was on the corridor of the country’s worst criminals. He lived there for 12 years until he was transferred, along with his His brother Omar—arrested two years later—is being flown to the United States, where he awaits a trial that could result in life imprisonment.

The arrest of one of the most bloodthirsty and elusive drug lords would lead anyone to assume that Sánchez Labrada would be rewarded with a promotion or a medal. Instead, he was sent back to Piedras Negras, Coahuila, to operate tirelessly with “Salvador,” where the fury of Los Zetas was still alive after the arrest of their leader.

But on August 3, 2013, the captain felt the rage in the flesh. At 1:55 p.m., a couple of municipal police officers asked him for support to stop a pickup truck with two people allegedly armed and who were reported for assault and trespassing. Labrada followed up, made the arrest and found only the driver, who was not carrying weapons or drugs, so he released Jesús Alberto Cruz Contreras. Hours later, a man who identified himself as the father of Armando Humberto del Bosque Villarreal arrived and accused that his son was unreachable after Labrada’s alleged arrest with other Villarreal sailors.

The plot thickened for him when the case reached a national newscast. The family of Armando Humberto del Bosque Villarreal had gained media attention thanks to the advice of activist Raymundo Ramos Vasquez, who has been multi-awarded for his defense of human rights, but is also accused of working for Los Zetas “in cahoots” now for the Northwest Cartel, cases of forced disappearance and extrajudicial execution to demand the departure of the Armed Forces from Tamaulipas. The story was sold as “the first extrajudicial execution attributed to the Mexican Navy in the government of Enrique Peña Nieto”.

By October, Sánchez Labrada had already been summoned to testify, and the case was snowballing. The captain’s instinct began to form: the municipal police, angry that Z40’s arrest had cut off a significant flow of dirty money, were taking revenge against him.

The hunch became a reality when he met with Alfredo Grande Barrera, the dirty chief of the Anáhuac police and an operator for Los Zetas, and the latter—unaware he was being recorded—told him: “You owed us this.” This recording is one of the numerous pieces of evidence of a plotted revenge against the captain.

Alarmed, Sánchez Labrada sought legal advice. His lawyer found several irregularities: the report of Armando Humberto’s alleged arrest and disappearance had been altered with forged signatures from municipal police officers; the reconstruction of the events made it impossible to carry out the crime; there were hidden expert reports that proved the sailor’s innocence, among other inconsistencies.

“I currently have an appeal for recognition of innocence before the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation because I was sentenced with false documents. The High Court admitted that there was a corrupting effect and illicit evidence that were not assessed in the original proceedings,” says the former military officer firmly. “My case will be resolved in the next few days at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Monterrey, presided over by Judge Angelica Lucio Rosales. She will be able to grant me the Recognition of Innocence, which is the annulment of the sentence of an innocent person after exhausting all remedies.

“That’s what I want: for them to tell me, ‘You were always innocent, you can walk away clean, with your name and honor intact,’” he says.

Sánchez Labrada Arrested in an Apparently Fabricated Case

On March 2, 2016, standing in his lodgings in Tampico, Tamaulipas, where he was preparing to take the selection exam for the Staff Diploma offered in Mexico City, Sánchez Labrada made the most difficult decision of his life: commit suicide and cast doubt on his innocence, or live to fight and shake it off. Unjustly burdened with the guilt of disappearing and murdering a young man.

“I was notified at 8 a.m. that the Ministerial Police of the former PGR had arrived with an arrest warrant and had transferred me to Mexico City. I quickly went to my place to change, but I was disoriented; I thought about running, escaping, a thousand things. And there I was, with my gun in my right hand, a 9-millimeter Beretta PX4 Storm with a magazine in it, ready to blow my head off; “I didn’t do it because it meant I was guilty,” he recalls.

Paradoxically, he followed the same flight route as El Z40: by plane to the nation’s capital and then to what the Armed Forces call “The Stone House,” Military Prison Number 1-A, where he was given an electric blue uniform and black boots. To top it all off, that shade of blue is similar to the Zeta blue that gave rise to the cartel Labrada had risked his life to fight.

In military prison, he would learn of yet another irregularity in his case: at the Central Military Hospital, Captain Alfredo Grande Barrera’s “vocal cords were ruptured” when military doctors attempted to sample his voice to corroborate that it was his voice in the video threatening him. After this botched operation, he died mysteriously. His death came as a relief to a high-ranking officer who had been mentioned in the same video as plotting revenge.

Finally, on February 28, 2020, after four years of trial and his freedom secured, he and the four alleged accomplices were sentenced: 22 years and six months in prison for forced disappearance—later reduced to nine years, four months, and 15 days—plus an open case for aggravated homicide with the same evidence and irregularities. Once again, Icarus falling from the sun until he slammed into the earth.

“You fall, you sink, depression gets the better of you… but then you want to fight, to give meaning to that day that I didn’t kill myself with my own gun. So I started to study, to learn, to do everything to save myself,” he says.

More than a decade has passed and Sánchez Labrada insists on his innocence: Mr. Armando del Bosque Gutiérrez accuses him of the disgrace of the murder of his son, who was carried away while drunk by municipal police officers who worked for Los Zetas and wanted to teach him a lesson. Leader for captain; narco for marine.

In a few days the case of Captain Sanchez Labrada will be resolved.

“This is my last chance to prove my innocence. As I told you, in a few days the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Monterrey will resolve my case. I’m going for everything: recognition of innocence and the annulment of the sentence for forced disappearance,” he asserts.

In fact, he says, on July 16th he completed 100% of his sentence for forced disappearance, but he can’t leave the military prison because the trial for the murder of the missing boy continues. The charges are complex, so if the authorities determine his innocence in the unlawful detention, they will surely also determine his innocence in the murder.

Sánchez Labrada is confident in good news in the days following your reading of this text. It is the final battle for his innocence. His most cherished dream. If he succeeds, he will have made history in the books of military justice in Mexico; if not, he assures, his case will go down in the dark chapters of military personnel imprisoned for doing their duty.

Mexico has failed an exemplary sailor – myself included – but, he insists, in a few days it will be possible to make up for that damage: kill prisoner 11033 of Military Prison 1 and see Commander Raul Sanchez Labrada on the street again, free and clean. The sailor who risked his life to free us from the evil of Z40.

Source: Milenio