About

In his role as senior vice president legal affairs – Latin America and Caribbean, Ernesto Grijalva brings over 25 years’ experience in international business law to his responsibilities of overseeing PriceSmart’s international legal matters. Grijalva states: ‘We built the legal department from handling legal matters in just one foreign jurisdiction to seventeen foreign jurisdictions today’. The PriceSmart legal department makes it possible for the operations department to focus on their primary responsibilities of running the business, leaving legal to deal with, and remove, constantly developing legal obstacles in their way. He takes particular pride in the relationship established with the outside counsel in each country in which PriceSmart operates. ‘With the invaluable help of outside counsel, PriceSmart has successfully exposed the [erroneous] myths about doing business in developing countries, including that, developing countries were too poor for the membership shopping concept to work and that businesses cannot succeed in these countries playing strictly by the rules’, explains Grijalva. Among other achievements, he has managed the filing of a claim against a government demanding enforcement of that government’s written laws and regulations. He is now in the process of completing the legal integration of PriceSmart’s recent acquisition of Aeropost, one of the leading package delivery services in Latin America and the Caribbean. Having joined PriceSmart in 1998, Grijalva has worked with many of PriceSmart’s Latin American and Caribbean outside counsel for 15 years or longer. ‘Those outstanding relationships have created a trusted partnership in the representation and protection of PriceSmart everywhere we operate. It is an association of excellent attorneys of which I am extremely proud’, he explains.