María Elvira Salazar

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 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 Miami (1983). Additionally, she earned a Master's degree 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 at Estación Sin, and the following year she made her debut at Univision.

In 1988, she joined the first version of CNN in Spanish as a correspondent through Telemundo. As a result of this and due to job requirements, she moved to El Salvador in 1991, where she spent 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 at 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 confronta for channel 41 América TV, where she secured 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 entrepreneur Raúl Alarcón and rebranded as Mega TV, María Elvira took on a new challenge with her show Maria Elvira Live.

In 2012, after a period away from television, she embarked on a new project with Caracol, the Gente TV channel. Her program, Maria Elvira, was on the air for only a few months due to the channel’s buyout, but that was enough time to conduct several interviews with the characters from the telenovela Pablo Escobar: el patrón del mal and with Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez (Popeye), a close associate 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; it was 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 television with her eponymous show for the CNN Latino channel.

Among the numerous interviews conducted, in addition to those mentioned, are those with 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 congressional district following the retirement of Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, but was ultimately defeated by Democrat Donna Shalala.

In August 2020, the journalist and Miami-Dade Mayor, 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 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 opportunity to fight for the position in his district in the federal Congress when he faces off again against the Democrat Donna Shalala.