Juan Carlos has 17 years with The Nature Conservancy and now serves ResCA as the Public Policy and Institutional Relations Specialist. He is trained as a Biologist and has completed graduate studies in protected area planning, territorial arrangements, and integrated management of hydrological resources in Costa Rica, the USA, and Israel. In his early years at TNC, he worked for 8 years in 7 countries of Central America consolidating national protected areas systems and, at the same time, promoting the Regional Mesoamerican Biological Corridor Program.

In Guatemala, his native country, beginning in 2012 under the Climate, Nature, and Communities Program, Juan Carlos made important contributions to creating climate change legislation as part of the National Climate Change Table and the Climate Change Sciences for Adaptation of the Guatemalan System Group. At the same time, he is still representing TNC within the Fund for the Tropical Forests of Guatemala (a result of a debt swap), and the Governing Board of the Metropolitan Region Water Conservation Foundation (FUNCAGUA), both of which he helped create in 2015 and 2017 respectively.

Before joining TNC, Juan Carlos served as the Director of the Center for Conservation Studies (CECON), Coordinator of the National Commission on Environment (CONAMA), and Vice Minister of the Environment and Natural Resources in Guatemala. Additionally, he collaborated as a functionary for international organizations at the reginal level with the Central American Commission for Environment and Development (CCAD), the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE), and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).