Federico Ovejero, General Motors' vice president for Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, announced he will retire at the end of June. In the last two years Ovejero was the virtual number one of the American automaker in the country and so far his position has no replacement. The General Motors subsidiary is in charge of the company's South America area, which is headed by Colombian Santiago Chamorro from Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The institutional representation exercised until now by Ovejero will be assumed by the commercial director of the subsidiary, also Colombian Raúl Mier.
Ovejero, 55, sent a note on Wednesday in which he said that "after almost 8 years at GM, June 30 will be the time to start a new stage in my professional life." Prior to joining General Motors, Ovejero held management positions in institutional relations at Unilever, McDonalds and Walmart.
In the last two years, Ovejero was the executive who carried out the final stage of the industrial launch of the Chevrolet Tracker that since October is produced at the General Motors plant in the town of General Alvear, on the outskirts of Rosario.
That project, which involved an investment of 300 million dollars, had been announced in 2017 by Carlos Zarlenga, who was the first Argentine president of the local subsidiary of General Motors, a position that became vacant when Zarlenga was promoted as head of GM South America. Ovejero seconded him as regional vice president.
Zarlenga's announcement, in 2017, was to launch the new model in 2020. But after the devaluation of 2018 the shocks began: that same year the automaker had to go out to confirm the project, in the face of rumors that came about questions from the Detroit headquarters, in charge of financing the investment.
In 2020, all automakers had to paralyze their activity for two months due to the pandemic and the investment of the Rosario plant was also suspended. In the middle of that year the investment was again confirmed.
Zarlenga retired from General Motors in August 2021, and after a brief stint at the head of an investment fund he founded together with his colleague Barry Engle (who had developed a parallel career as head of General Motors for North America), the Argentine was summoned in August 2022 to head the Mexico subsidiary of the automaker Stellantis. Another year had passed and the new Tracker was still not on the market.
Santiago Chamorro President and CEO of GM South America
The launch was finally in October of last year, in an almost unprecedented event in the local automotive industry: a new model, made in Argentina, without ribbon cuttings. The new Tracker was released without ceremony or presentation. The final task of that stage, bureaucratic and silent, was carried out by Ovejero, according to sources in the sector from Mexico, where today Zarlenga commands his competitor Stellantis.
