Rafael E. Pino
Rafael Eduardo Pino was sustained on April 5, 2008, as a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy and a General Authority of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He had been serving as a member of the Fourth Quorum of the Seventy at the time of his call. He is the first Venezuelan to serve as a General Authority.
He has served in the Church as a bishop, high councilor, mission president’s counselor, and stake president. As a young man, he served a full-time mission in the Venezuela Maracaibo Mission. He presided over the Argentina Rosario Mission from 1999 to 2002. While serving as an Area Seventy, he served in the South America North Area.
Pino was educated in commerce at the Colegio Carabobo in 1974 and received his certificate in administration in Caracas, Venezuela. Prior to his call to full-time Church service, he was working as a regional manager for temporal affairs for the LDS Church and had worked in a variety of capacities for the Church since 1980.
He was born on October 27, 1955, in Valencia, Venezuela. He joined the Church of Jesus Christ in 1972 after learning about the gospel in the home of family members who were being taught by missionaries. In 1981 he married Patricia Monica Villa Dassler in the Washington D.C. Temple and they are the parents of three children.
