María Elvira Salazar is a journalist and host of Cuban descent born on November 1, 1961, in Miami, Florida.
Daughter of Cuban immigrants. She lived in Puerto Rico until she was 16, when she moved to the United States. Once there, she studied at Miami Dade College and the School of Journalism at Miami (1983). In addition, she earned a Master's in Public Administration in 1995 from Harvard University.
She began her professional career as a reporter for Channel 23. A year later, she made the leap to the main news program of Estación Sin, and the following year, she debuted at Univision.
In 1988, she joined the first version of CNN in Spanish as a correspondent through Telemundo. As a result of this and the demands of her work, in 1991 she moved to El Salvador, where she stayed for two years as the head of the Central America news bureau for CNN and carried out several reports on the Salvadoran civil war.
In 1993, she joined the staff of Telemundo. In 1995, she interviewed Fidel Castro. Nine years later, in 2002, she left the network. That same year, she started her program María Elvira confronta for channel 41 América TV, where she obtained the last interview given by Augusto Pinochet. A year later, her program moved to Canal 22. In July 2006, when the network was acquired by entrepreneur Raúl Alarcón and renamed Mega TV, María Elvira took on a new challenge with her program Maria Elvira Live.
In 2012, after a period away from television, she embarked on a new project with Caracol and the Gente TV channel. Her program Maria Elvira aired for only a few months due to the acquisition of the channel, but it was enough time to feature several interviews with characters from the soap opera Pablo Escobar: el patrón del mal, as well as with Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez (Popeye), the right-hand man of the notorious drug trafficker.
In March 2013, the blogger Yoani Sánchez gave an interview to Maria Elvira, which was published on her personal page—the only interview granted to a Latina journalist during Yoani's visit to the United States. In August of that same year, she returned to the small screen with her namesake program for CNN Latino.
Among the numerous interviews she has conducted are those with Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Raúl Castro, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, among others, in addition to the ones mentioned.
He has received 5 Emmy Awards for some of his reports.
In March 2018, Salazar announced her candidacy to represent the 27th congressional district, following the retirement of Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, but she was defeated by Democrat Donna Shalala.
In August 2020, the journalist and the mayor of Miami-Dade, Carlos Giménez, became Republican candidates for the United States Congress after both won their primary elections in their respective districts. María Elvira dominated the contest in District 27, receiving 79.04% of the votes (39,330), compared to nearly 11% for Raymond Molina and 9.99% for Juan Fiol.
In November 2020, he will have a second opportunity to fight for his congressional seat when he faces the Democrat Donna Shalala once again.
