María Elvira Salazar is a journalist and host of Cuban descent, born on November 1, 1961, in Miami, Florida.
Daughter of Cuban émigrés. She lived in Puerto Rico until the age of 16, when she moved to the United States. Once there, she studied at Miami Dade College and the School of Journalism at the University of Miami (1983). Additionally, she completed a Master's in Public Administration in 1995 at Harvard University.
She began her professional career as a reporter for Channel 23. A year later, she transitioned to the main newscast of Estación Sin, and the following year, she made her debut on Univision.
In 1988, she joined the first version of CNN en Español as a correspondent through Telemundo. As a result of this and due to work demands, she moved to El Salvador in 1991, where she spent two years as the head of the Central America news bureau for CNN, conducting 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 launched her program *María Elvira confronts* on channel 41, América TV, where she obtained the last interview given by Augusto Pinochet. A year later, her program moved to Channel 22. In July 2006, when the network was acquired by businessman Raúl Alarcón and rebranded as Mega TV, María Elvira embarked 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 the Caracol network on Gente TV. Her program, Maria Elvira, was on air for just a few months due to the channel's buying and selling, but that was enough time to conduct 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 gives an interview that Maria Elvira publishes on her personal page, the only one granted to a Latina journalist during Yoani's visit to the United States. In August of that same year, she returns to television with her eponymous program for CNN Latino.
Among the numerous interviews he has conducted are those with, in addition to the ones mentioned, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Raúl Castro, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, among others.
He has received 5 Emmy Awards for some of his reports.
In March 2018, Salazar announced her candidacy to represent the 27th district in Congress, 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 the primary elections in their respective districts. María Elvira had a landslide victory in the District 27 race, securing 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 chance to fight for his district's seat in the federal Congress when he faces off again against the Democrat Donna Shalala.
