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, then moved to the United States. Once there, she studied at Miami Dade College and the School of Journalism in Miami (1983). She also earned 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 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, she moved to live in El Salvador in 1991, where she spent two years as the head of the Central America news bureau for CNN, conducting 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 launched her program María Elvira confronta for channel 41 América TV, where she obtained 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 took on a new challenge with her show 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 show Maria Elvira only aired for a few months due to the buyout of the channel, but it was enough time 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 of the notorious 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 show on CNN Latino.
Among the numerous interviews he has conducted are those with Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Raúl Castro, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, among others, in addition to those mentioned.
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 departure 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 won decisively in the District 27 contest, receiving 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 position in the federal Congress when he faces the Democrat Donna Shalala again.
