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 at the School of Journalism in 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 news program of Estación Sin, and the following year, she debuted on 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 work demands, she moved to El Salvador in 1991, where she lived 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 América TV, where she secured the last interview granted by Augusto Pinochet. A year later, her program moved to Canal 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 show Maria Elvira was on the air for only a few months due to the buying and selling of the channel, but it was enough time to conduct several interviews with characters from the soap opera Pablo Escobar: the patron of evil, as well as with Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez (Popeye), the right-hand man of the notorious drug trafficker’s inner circle.
In March 2013, the blogger Yoani Sánchez granted an interview to Maria Elvira, which was published on her personal page, the only interview given 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 program on CNN Latino.
Among the numerous interviews he has conducted are those with, in addition to those 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 congressional district, following the retirement of Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, but 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 dominated the race in District 27, obtaining 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 once again.
