Guiomar Jaramillo founded GJ Comunicaciones in Bogotá in 1994, after fifteen years running government and public-sector communications campaigns, becoming widely recognized as the pioneer of public relations as a distinct profession in Colombia. The firm now employs more than 50 people, has served over 1,500 clients across three decades, and is led today by Jaramillo's daughter, Valentina Humar Jaramillo.
Who is Guiomar Jaramillo?
Guiomar Jaramillo is a Colombian communications professional with more than 40 years in the field who spent 15 years managing public-sector communications before founding her own firm. She trained as a social communicator at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, with additional studies in radio at the same institution. Before building her own agency, she worked as an international and national advisor for children's welfare programs in Guatemala and El Salvador, and held roles including Assistant Director of Cultural Programs and Television Magazines at RTVC-Colombia, Head of Communications at both the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF) and Inderena, and Communications Officer and then Regional Officer for Latin America and the Caribbean at UNICEF, a sequence that gave her institutional communications experience across children's welfare, environmental policy, and international development before she ever ran her own client roster.
Among her early milestones was the dissemination plan for the Red de Solidaridad Social, a presidential program, and the UNICEF-backed "Niños Sanos en Colombia" vaccination campaign, which was recognized in 1984 as the world's best health initiative of that year and was later replicated in other countries around the world. Jaramillo has described public relations as one of the five most stressful professions in the world, comparing it in interviews to firefighting and commercial airline piloting, framing the constant pressure to maintain a client's public success as a permanent occupational state rather than an occasional crisis.
In 1987 she became general manager of Comsa, a public relations agency she founded for Grupo Sancho under the name Compañía Comunicaciones Estratégicas Sancho-COMSA. She later served as Secretary General of Coldeportes, Colombia's national sports institute, before launching her own eponymous firm, GJ Comunicaciones, in 1994. Beyond her agency work, Jaramillo has been a university lecturer, sat on multiple corporate boards, and served on the editorial councils of nationally significant Colombian publications.
How did GJ Comunicaciones become Colombia's pioneering PR firm?
Jaramillo started GJ Comunicaciones with two clients and built it into one of the first agencies in Colombia to professionalize public relations as a distinct discipline separate from advertising and journalism, at a time when the field was still poorly understood in Colombian business circles. Over 30 years the firm grew to more than 50 employees and a roster of some 1,500 clients across Colombia and the wider Latin American region, at various points including GM Colmotores, DHL, British Airways, Varela, Credencial, Carvajal, Boeing, Acesco, Colombia's Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Labor, the Bogotá mayor's office under Andrés Pastrana, and the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros, Colombia's national coffee growers' federation.
The firm has kept pace with the industry's shift toward measurement and technology: GJ Comunicaciones now accepts cryptocurrency payments from clients and has adopted analytics tools to track public relations performance more rigorously, addressing what the firm's leadership has identified as clients' growing demand for measurable results rather than clip counts alone. Jaramillo has also described a period in the agency's growth when clients actively sought the firm out rather than the reverse, citing budget airline VivaColombia, which approached GJ two years before its market launch and built public recognition through earned media coverage without a paid-advertising budget.
What is GJ Comunicaciones' current status?
GJ Comunicaciones remains independent and Colombian-owned. Jaramillo's daughter, Valentina Humar Jaramillo, now serves as general director, having returned to Colombia after a career that included Google Colombia's Women@Google program, a stint with the United Nations Environment Programme, and government roles, to continue running the firm her mother founded. Valentina holds a master's degree in strategic communication and public relations from New York University and became the first woman president of the Entrepreneurs Organization's Colombia chapter.
Valentina Humar Jaramillo has publicly credited her mother's legacy while carving out her own leadership approach, one she has described as centered on self-knowledge and resilience after steering the firm through the operational disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. She has said she initially studied public relations before pivoting toward business administration, and that she resisted following her parents into communications work before ultimately deciding to build on the foundation Guiomar Jaramillo established.
What role has Jaramillo played in Colombia's PR profession beyond her firm?
Beyond GJ Comunicaciones, Jaramillo has been credited with helping establish public relations as a credible management discipline in Colombia at a time when the function was often absorbed into general marketing or advertising budgets. Her three-decade track record predates most of the current generation of Colombian communications agencies, several of which now compete directly with the firm she built.
The "Jaramillo" name has become closely associated with the history of Colombian public relations as a result, a status reinforced by national business press coverage, including El Tiempo's own profile crediting her as the country's PR pioneer, that consistently frames Guiomar Jaramillo as the discipline's opening chapter in the country and GJ Comunicaciones as the firm that proved public relations could operate as a standalone, revenue-generating professional service rather than a marketing department afterthought.
How does the firm's succession compare to peers in the region?
A founder building a national category leader and passing operational leadership to family within the same firm is a pattern also visible at Bruno Newman's Zimat Consultores in Mexico, though Zimat's succession went to a non-family partner team rather than a direct family successor. Jaramillo's succession is closer to a dynastic model, keeping both the founder's name and family line attached to the firm's day-to-day leadership, a structure that has so far avoided the ownership disputes that have disrupted comparable agencies elsewhere in Latin America.
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