salt: salt.states.locale not setting LANG variable

The mongodb daemon crashes when the LANG environmental variable is not set to something like en_US.UTF-8. On Debian Wheezy, out of the box service mongodb start won’t work. The solution requires setting the default locale, but while salt is able to do that properly using the locale state, it is not able to pass it to the service state.

Since the service binary on the a default Wheezy installation execute /etc/init.d/ scripts using $LANG, I’m kind of stuck.

What do you suggest in this situation? Thanks.