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 the age of 16 when she moved to the United States. Once there, she studied at Miami Dade College and the College 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 newscast of Estación Sin, and the following year, she debuted on Univision.
In 1988, she joined as a correspondent for the first Spanish version of CNN through Telemundo. As a result of this and due to job requirements, 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 at Telemundo. In 1995, she interviewed Fidel Castro. Nine years later, in 2002, she left the network. That same year, she started her program María Elvira confronta for channel 41 América TV, where she obtained the last interview given 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 of Gente TV. Her program, Maria Elvira, was on the air for only a few months due to the buying and selling of the channel, but that was enough to feature several interviews with characters from the telenovela Pablo Escobar: el patrón del mal, as well as Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez (Popeye), the right-hand man of the notorious drug trafficker's inner circle.
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 eponymous show for the CNN Latino channel.
Among the numerous interviews he has 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 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 dominated the contest in District 27, securing 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 seat in Congress when he faces the Democrat Donna Shalala again.
