Doing Business Between Canada and Latin America: What Newcomers and Companies Get Wrong
Enrique Sobalvarro built a career in international trade in Guatemala, then arrived in Canada as an asylum seeker with no contacts and no way to prove any of it. He rebuilt from a barista job into a trade consultancy connecting Canadian and Latin American companies, and along the way learned exactly which assumptions kill cross-border deals before they start.
Starting over with no network
Enrique Sobalvarro built his career in Guatemala working in international trade, supply chain, and geopolitical analysis, and ran his own businesses on the side, including a clothing production factory. After what he describes only as unfortunate events in Central America, he came to Canada as an asylum seeker. He arrived, in his words, with "no contacts, no professional attachment or business attachment here."
His first job in Canada was as a barista at a well-known coffee shop. He assumed people would naturally open doors for him. They didn't. What changed things was three people who took the time to sit down with him over coffee and actually listen to his story. Podcast host Samir Musayev was one of them. From there, people started calling him in for trade consulting work, and he began volunteering with nonprofits and mentoring other newcomers, from asylum seekers to credentialed professionals, on how to work through Canada's immigration system.
His advice for people arriving with the fewest resources: find the settlement nonprofits first. In his experience they're free, and staffed by people trained to walk newcomers through a work permit application or income support request step by step, even though they aren't immigration lawyers. He names the language barrier as the biggest obstacle for this group specifically. Not understanding what people are saying to you becomes stressful in a way that can tip into depression, he says, especially for adults who don't pick up a new language as fast as children do. "Everything is temporary," he tells people still in that position. "This is not going to take forever."
A credential that doesn't travel with you
For licensed professionals, arrival is where the real work starts. Enrique points out that a lawyer coming to Canada is essentially starting from zero, because the legal systems don't match. An engineer keeps the title but not the assumptions: knowing how to drill in Venezuela doesn't mean knowing Canada's procedures, safety requirements, or reclamation rules for the same job.
He went through his own version of this. His postgraduate degree in international trade and business was well recognized across Central America and meant little in Canada. He pursued the Certified International Trade Professional designation, and studied who already held it so he could build a network inside the field he wanted to reenter. His read on where a lot of skilled newcomers get stuck: people arrive holding many titles "but they are not knowing themselves." When you don't know what's already in your own toolbox, he says, you can't show it to anyone, even though it's there.
A cardiologist behind the shawarma counter
One story Enrique tells has stayed with him. He was ordering food when the man preparing it mentioned, almost in passing, that he had been a cardiologist back home in the Middle East. He'd arrived in Canada as an asylum seeker eight months earlier, alone, believing that the family he'd left behind was likely dead. He told Enrique he had no real purpose left.
They kept talking, roughly twice a month, during the man's breaks, over several months. Enrique mostly listened. Then one day the man told him, "I found it. I want to help others." He trained as an interpreter, and now works for the federal government interpreting at official hearings. Enrique remembers watching him cut chicken at that counter "like a surgeon," fully present in work he hadn't chosen, before he'd found the one he had.
The misconceptions holding Canadian companies back
Enrique hears the same assumptions from Canadian companies eyeing Latin America: that doing business there means dealing with corruption, that partners won't comply with contracts, that the market simply "isn't worth it." That last one, he says, rarely comes with an actual reason attached. A company fails there and nobody examines why; the failure just gets filed away as proof the whole region is a bad bet. Much of the caution traces back to the political instability of the 1960s through the early 1990s, a period that shaped a lot of thinking still repeated today, long after the conditions changed.
His practical starting point: treat every country as its own market rather than one region. Mexico is the easier entry, thanks to existing free trade agreements and abundant public information. Beyond that, the right first market depends on what you're selling and what a given country actually needs. He points to Colombia's oil and gas sector as one that many Canadian service and product providers overlook entirely, and to Export Development Canada's market data and reporting as a starting point for the research.
Two mistakes that sink market entry
The single biggest failure point, in his view, is making assumptions instead of doing the research. He uses sandwich cookies, the Oreo type, as an example: the same global brand tastes different depending on the market, because the recipe gets adapted locally. Companies sometimes assume that because a product is popular with Latin American communities living in North America, it will sell the same way, unchanged, back home. It won't.
The second mistake is treating price as the whole strategy. Being cheaper doesn't guarantee shelf space; getting there takes the right distribution partner, one who already knows how to merchandise and negotiate visibility in that market. Choosing that partner, he says, means going through people already working there with no stake in the outcome: trade commissioners, delegates, and chambers of commerce. Guatemala and Mexico both have Canadian chambers of commerce that can tell a company the good, the bad, and the ugly before any money changes hands.
Key takeaways
- Free settlement nonprofits can walk newcomers, including asylum seekers, through work permit and income support applications step by step. Find one before doing anything else.
- Licensed professions like law, medicine, and engineering rarely transfer directly. Expect a credentialing process, and take the time to identify the skills you already have before trying to show them to anyone.
- Treat Latin America as dozens of distinct markets, not one. Products, pricing, and partners need country-by-country research, not assumptions.
- A trusted local partner, vetted through a chamber of commerce or trade commissioner, matters more to market entry than being the lowest price on the shelf.