  The discovery of neutrino masses has raised the importance of studies in the
context of neutrinoless double beta decay, which constitutes a landmark for
lepton number violation. The standard interpretation is that the light massive
neutrinos, that we observed oscillating in terrestrial experiments, mediate
double beta decay. In the minimal 3-3-1 model, object of our study, there is an
additional contribution that stems from the mixing between a new charged vector
boson, $W^{\prime}$, and the Standard Model W boson. Even after setting this
mixing to be very small, we show that tight constraints arise from the
non-observation of neutrinoless double beta decay. Indeed, we derive bounds on
the mass of the $W^{\prime}$ gauge boson that might exceed those from collider
probes, and most importantly push the scale of symmetry breaking beyond its
validity, leading to the exclusion of the minimal 3-3-1 model.
