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 at the School of Journalism at the University of Miami (1983). She also earned a Master's in Public Administration in 1995 from Harvard University.
She begins her professional career as a reporter at Channel 23. A year later, she makes the leap to the main newscast of Estación Sin, and the following year, she debuts at Univision.
In 1988, she joined as 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 stayed for two years as the news bureau chief for Central America 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 confronts 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 renamed 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 on Gente TV. Her program Maria Elvira was on air for only a few months due to the buying and selling of the channel, but that was enough time to conduct several interviews with the characters from the telenovela Pablo Escobar: el patrón del mal, as well as with Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez (Popeye), the right-hand man of the infamous drug trafficker.
In March 2013, the blogger Yoani Sánchez granted an interview that Maria Elvira published on her personal page, the only one 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 for CNN Latino.
Among the numerous interviews he has conducted are, in addition to those mentioned, interviews 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 defeated by Democrat Donna Shalala.
In August 2020, journalist María Elvira 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 overwhelmingly 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 chance to fight for the position of his district in the federal Congress when he faces the Democrat Donna Shalala once again.
