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 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). Additionally, 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 newscast of Estación Sin, and the following year, she debuted on Univision.
In 1988, she joined the first version of CNN in Spanish through Telemundo as a correspondent. As a result of this and the demands of her job, in 1991 she relocated to El Salvador, where she stayed for two years as the head of the Central America news bureau for CNN and conducted 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 began her program María Elvira confronta for channel 41 America TV, where she obtained the last interview granted 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 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 the Caracol network on the channel Gente TV. Her show Maria Elvira was only on the air for a few months due to the buying and selling of the channel, but it was enough to feature several interviews with the characters from the telenovela Pablo Escobar: el patrón del mal and with Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez (Popeye), the right-hand man of the notorious drug trafficker.
In March 2013, the blogger Yoani Sánchez granted an interview to Maria Elvira, which was published on her personal page—the only interview she gave to a Latina journalist during her visit to the United States. In August of that same year, she returned to television with her eponymous program for the CNN Latino channel.
Among the numerous interviews he 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 after the retirement of Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, but she was defeated by Democrat Donna Shalala.
In August 2020, the journalist María Elvira 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 triumphed in the District 27 contest, 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 seat in the federal Congress when he faces the Democrat Donna Shalala again.
