Contact: Sammy McDavid
The consul general of Brazil to Miami, Fla., will visit Jackson Thursday [Sept. 23] to address the city's Executive Lecture Forum.
Joao Almino will speak during a University Club luncheon that gets under way at 11:45 a.m. He also is tentatively scheduled to meet that day with Gov. Haley Barbour and officials of the Mississippi Development Authority.
As with other ELF speakers, Almino's appearance is being coordinated by the Janos Radvanyi Chair in International Security Studies at Mississippi State University.
Before joining his country's diplomatic corps, Almino was a political scientist and literary writer. He completed doctoral study in France under the direction of philosopher Claude Lefort and has taught at universities in Mexico and Brazil, as well as at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University. He earlier served as consul general in San Francisco and in Lisbon, Spain.
Almino's native country is the largest in South America--3.3 million square miles--with a population of more than 176 million. Textiles, shoes, chemicals, cement, and lumber are its major industries, while the chief crops include coffee, soybeans, sugarcane, cocoa, rice, corn, wheat, and citrus.
While Executive Lecture Forums are not open to the general public, interested members of the news media are welcome to attend. To assure adequate seating, reporters planning to cover the program are requested to telephone (662) 325-8406 in advance.