About

DIRECTV Latin America provides best-in-class digital entertainment experiences by delivering high in demand content across the continent. Juan Camilo Castro Salcedo serves the organisation as legal director for the Latin America North Region, a role he has excelled in since taking on the challenge in 2015. ‘I’m leading the legal matters of the company in the different countries of the North Region (Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and the Caribbean), providing legal assessment in corporate, IP, finance, regulatory, commercial, criminal and labour matters’, he says when describing his role. He highlights having responsibility for the regional team as a particular career highlight: ‘This gives me perspective on the important knowledge and necessities in different jurisdictions, like Venezuela, that [opens my creative] side to help the operation’. Castro is credited for restructuring the legal departments in the four countries he oversees, in order to build a regional department that share practices, knowledge and, where necessary, centralising decisions. ‘I focus the department on the anticipation of different regulatory matters in the countries, just to get market opportunities in cost reductions, savings, and new business opportunities’, he says. Another key feature of Castro’s tenure at DIRECTV is his impressive work on a number of transactions and disputes. To this end he worked on the negotiation of the local soccer rights in Ecuador, litigations with PROs (performance rights organisations) in order to reduce the current fees whilst also challenging the rights on the pay TV activity across the region as well as a litigation for the “must carry” obligation on the local private channels in Colombia. ‘We got a positive precedent in 2017 that confirms the impossibility to collect money for any right related with this for the local private broadcasters’, he says regarding the aforementioned dispute. Castro is also praised for working on the new corporate structure for DIRECTV Latin America. He has worked in-house in a number of sectors; prior to working for the organisation, he spent three years at 3M Colombia where he was commissioned to run the government business unit, in order to control different situations and also maintain growth following a compliance issue. ‘This experience taught me that compliance is integrity, not only a summary of laws and regulation, [it is living] integrity and everybody needs to understand it’. Before 3M, Castro was country counsel for IBM in Colombia between 2007 and 2011. He has also worked as legal analyst for a local credit bureau and as legal analyst in a financial institution over the course of his career. Among his various career highlights, he identifies possibility to negotiate government contracts as a proud moment: ‘In my career, I had the chance to negotiate important contracts with government entities (the production of passports, medical supplies for public hospitals, signal for roads, telecommunication concessions, etc.), this provided me with an integral vision of a business and practicality [when taking] decisions’.