María Elvira Salazar

María Elvira Salazar is a journalist and presenter of Cuban descent born on November 1, 1961 in Miami, Florida.

Daughter of Cuban immigrants. She lived in Puerto Rico until she was 16 years old when she moved to the United States. Once there, she studied at Miami Dade College and at the School of Journalism in Miami (1983). She also obtained a Master's in Public Administration in 1995 from Harvard University.

She begins her professional career as a reporter for Channel 23. A year later, she makes the leap to the main newscast of Sin Station, and the following year she debuts on Univision.

In 1988, she joined as a correspondent to the first version of CNN in Spanish through Telemundo. As a result of this and due to work requirements, in 1991 she moved to live in El Salvador, where she remained for two years as the head of the news bureau for Central America for CNN and carried out several reports on the Salvadoran civil war.

In 1993, he joined the staff of Telemundo. In 1995, he interviewed Fidel Castro. Nine years later, in 2002, he left the network. That same year, he started his show María Elvira confronts on Channel 41 América TV, where he obtained the last interview granted by Augusto Pinochet. One year later, his show moved to Channel 22. In July 2006, when the network was acquired by businessman Raúl Alarcón and renamed Mega TV, María Elvira embarked on a new challenge with her show Maria Elvira Live.

In 2012, after a season away from television, she embarked on a new project with the Caracol network of the Gente TV channel. 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 conduct several interviews with the characters of the telenovela Pablo Escobar: El Patrón del Mal and with Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez (Popeye) himself, right-hand man of the inner circle of the well-known drug trafficker.

In March 2013, the blogger Yoani Sánchez granted an interview to Maria Elvira, which she published 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 returned to the small screen with her eponymous program for CNN Latino channel.

Among the numerous interviews he has conducted are, in addition to those mentioned, ones 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 district in Congress, following the retirement of Republican congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen but was defeated by the 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 swept the contest in District 27 after obtaining 79.04% of the votes (39,330), compared to almost 11% for Raymond Molina and 9.99% for Juan Fiol.

In November 2020, he will have a second opportunity to fight for the position representing his district in the federal Congress, when he faces Democrat Donna Shalala again.