Criminal Cartel Threatens Mexican Baked Goods Company Bimbo,Owned By Billionaire Servitje Family

The billionaire Servitje family of Mexico, led by Roberto Servitje, owns Grupo Bimbo, Mexico’s largest bakery company, with household brands including Nutella and Sara Lee sold throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Grupo Bimbo is being threatened by the criminal group Los Caballeros Templarios (The Knights Templar). The organization, a savage cartel that operates in the drug-plagued Mexican state of Michoacán,  has threatened to burn trucks owned by Bimbo, Marinela (the pastries division of Grupo Bimbo),  Barcel (a Bimbo unit that makes tortillas, potato chips and snacks) and Sabritas (a Pepsi-Cola subsidiary that makes snacks),  if they distribute their products during the next three weeks in the state’s Apatzingán region,  Mexico City’s leading daily, Reforma, reported on April 17.
Located in Western Mexico, the state of Michoacán has seen more than its share of violence in recent years as rival drug cartels fight for control of the state’s Pacific ports and clashes between gunmen and federal police have intensified.  In March, authorities found bodies of seven men tied up in plastic chairs placed along the side of a street.

“Beginning this week we are telling you that you are banned from supplying your products in the towns of Buenavista, La Ruana and Tepalcatepec, Michoacán. If you are found distributing in these places your trucks will be burned down,” the group threatened in a flyer also posted on social media sites. They didn’t give a reason for their threats, but in May of 2012, the organization’s armed commandos set fire to Sabritas facilities in Michoacán and the neighboring state of Guanajuato, alleging that Sabritas lent trucks to the Mexican Army to carry out “undercover operations” against them.
Carlos Galvez, President of Michoacán’s Business Council, said that the Council was concerned with the threats and asked the state and federal governments to take them seriously and strengthen security in the state. Galvez called on law-enforcement authorities to investigate the threats and keep them informed.
For the past six years,  the Washington-backed  war on drugs waged by former President Felipe Calderon, a Michoacán native, caused an unprecedented surge in violence:  70,000 people have died in drug-related violence and 26,000 have gone missing from 2006 to 2012.  The violence did not stop with the inauguration of President Enrique Peña Nieto in December 2012. During the first 100 days of his Administration,  2,882 people were killed in Mexico, 41 of them in Michoacán, according to Reforma’s “ejecutómetro” (a homicide barometer used to count drug-related deaths in Mexico.)