Florencio Salazar, one of Mexico's President-elect Felipe Calderón's chief political advisors and a member of the Presidential transition team will speak on "The Political Environment in Mexico and the New Government under President Felipe Calderón" in an address sponsored by the University of California, San Diego Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, at 5 p.m., Oct. 5. The talk will be presented in the Weaver Auditorium at the Institute of the Americas on the UCSD campus. The presentation is free and open to the public.

Members of the news media are invited, also, to participate in a news conference with Salazar to be held at 4 p.m., in room 4 of the Latin America Studies Building also at the Institute of the Americas complex.

Salazar spent much of his political career as a member of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) in his home state of Guerrero, where he served two terms in the state legislature, was mayor of Chilpancingo, served in the federal legislature, and was state secretary general under Governor René Juárez. Leaving the PRI in 2000, to join the campaign of then opposition candidate Vicente Fox, who, after becoming president, designated Salazar as coordinator of the Plan Puebla-Panama, an international project for economic and social development in southern Mexico and Central America. In 2003, Salaza r was named Minister of Agrarian Reform, a post he held until April 2006, when he left to work with the Calderón presidential campaign as adjunct secretary general of the National Action Party (PAN).