Mexico’s largest convenience store chain will reopen 191 stores in border city hit by gang threats

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s largest convenience store chain said Friday it will reopen 191 stores in the border city of Nuevo Laredo that it had closed last week because of drug cartel threats.

The Femsa corporation, which operates the Oxxo chain of convenience stores, said its stores and seven gas stations it operates will reopen Friday. Nuevo Laredo is located across the border from Laredo, Texas.

The company said it had reached an agreement with authorities for stepped-up police presence with “constant” patrols around the stores and the installation of panic buttons that can send a signal to police.

The store closures illustrated how even Mexico’s biggest firms are falling victim to gang demands for protection payments or information. A survey this week of Mexico’s larger corporations suggested gangs are increasingly trying to control the sale, distribution and pricing of certain goods.

Femsa said earlier this week it had long had to deal with cartel demands that its gas stations buy their fuel from certain distributors. But the straw that broke the camel’s back came in recent weeks when gang members abducted two store employees, demanding they act as lookouts or provide information to the gang.

Since convenience stores are used by most people in Mexico, the gangs see them as good points to keep tabs on the movements of police, soldiers and rivals.

“We had incidents in stores that consisted of them (gangs) demanding we give them certain information, and they even abducted two colleagues to enforce this demand,” Roberto Campa, Femsa’s director of corporate affairs, told local media.

Cartel violence in Mexico has long focused on smaller businesses, where owners often visit their shops and are easily abducted or approached by gang members to demand extortion payments. But Femsa is the largest soft drink bottler in Latin America, the largest Coca Cola bottler by sales volume and is listed on the Mexican stock exchange.

Nuevo Laredo has long been dominated by the Northeast Cartel — an offshoot of the old Zetas cartel — but the problem is starting to hit larger companies nationwide. Sectors ranging from agriculture, fishing and mining to consumer goods have been plagued by cartels trying to essentially take over their industries.

This week, the American Chamber of Commerce, whose members tend to be larger Mexican, American or multinational corporations, released a survey of its members in which 12% of respondents said that “organized crime has taken partial control of the sales, distribution and/or pricing of their goods.”

Even well-known, high-ranking business leaders aren’t safe.

On Monday, the head of the business chambers’ federation in Tamaulipas state, across the border from Texas, gave television interviews complaining about drug cartel extortion in the state. Hours later on Tuesday, Julio Almanza was shot to death outside his offices in the city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas.

“We are hostages to extortion demands, we are hostages of criminal groups,” Almanza said in one of his last interviews. “Charging extortion payments has practically become the national sport in Tamaulipas.”

Femsa’s Oxxo convenience stores are a target in part because they are so ubiquitous in Mexico: there are about 20,000 nationwide. In 2022, gangs set fires at about two dozen of the stores in the central state of Guanajuato to protest attempts to arrest a cartel leader.

In 2009, police in the western state of Jalisco found at least four severed heads in Styrofoam coolers with the stores’ logo on them; such coolers were sold to hold chilled drinks, but it became something of a trend for gangs to use them to hold decapitated heads.

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