María Elvira Salazar is a journalist and host of Cuban descent, born on November 1, 1961, in Miami, Florida.
Daughter of Cuban emigrants. 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 obtained 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 of Estación Sin, and the following year debuted at Univision.
In 1988, she became a correspondent for the first version of CNN en español through Telemundo. As a result of this, and due to work demands, in 1991 she moved to El Salvador, 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 of Telemundo. In 1995, she interviewed Fidel Castro. Nine years later, in 2002, she left the network. That same year, she started her show María Elvira confronta for channel 41 América TV, where she conducted 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 show Maria Elvira Live.
In 2012, after a time away from television, she embarked on a new project with Caracol, the Gente TV channel. Her program Maria Elvira was only on the air for a few months due to the sale of the channel, but those months were enough to feature several interviews with characters from the telenovela Pablo Escobar: el patrón del mal and with Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez (Popeye), the right-hand man in the inner circle of the notorious drug trafficker.
In March 2013, the blogger Yoani Sánchez gave an interview that Maria Elvira 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 television with her namesake program for CNN Latino.
Among the numerous interviews he has conducted are, in addition to those mentioned, 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 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 swept the contest in District 27, 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 chance to fight for his district's seat in the federal Congress when he faces off again against the Democrat Donna Shalala.
