María Elvira Salazar

Cuban-born journalist and news anchor, former news anchor at CNN and Telemundo and star of Mega TV channel. She is a regular analyst for Fox News and Fox Business on immigration issues on programs such as The O'Reilly Factor, Fox & Friends, among others.

Her parents, a law student and a Cuban-born shoemaker, emigrated to the United States after the triumph of the Revolution. She lived in Puerto Rico until her adolescence.

At age 16, she enrolled at Deerborne Academy in Coral Gables and graduated from Miami Dade College. She graduated from the School of Journalism in Miami in 1983. She also has studies and postgraduate degrees from prestigious institutions such as Harvard.

That year she began her professional career at Channel 23 as a reporter. A year later, she began as one of the first reporters at the main Spanish-language national news station in the United States at station SIN, later Univision.

In 1988, the first Spanish version of CNN begins in partnership with Telemundo, where she was the first CNN correspondent in Spanish. She moved to El Salvador in 1991 for two years where she was appointed head of the news bureau for Central America for CNN, where she conducted reports on the Salvadoran civil war.

In 1993 she begins working for Telemundo conducting various reports from Cuba, where she obtains an interview with Comandante Fidel Castro in 1995. She would remain at Telemundo as the main anchor of the national news broadcast alongside Pedro Sevcec.

In 2002, she was fired from Telemundo due to an alleged favorable treatment by the network toward host Laura Bozzo, with whom she maintained a legal confrontation where Laura accused María Elvira of testifying against her during a trial to investigate the relationship between Laura and Alberto Fujimori and Vladimiro Montesinos.

In 2002, after leaving Telemundo, she began the program "María Elvira Confronts" on channel 41 América TV, where she conducted the last interview granted by Chilean general Augusto Pinochet.

A year later, she moved to the then Channel 22 with the same program until 2006, when businessman Raúl Alarcón purchased the station and it became renamed Mega TV transforming the name to "Opposing Poles".

In July 2006, the program "María Elvira Live" is created, a format of news magazine and interviews of political nature, broadcast Monday through Friday at 8 p.m. The program was canceled due to a professional disagreement between María Elvira and Mega TV network.

On October 1st, 2012, after several months off television, she launches her new program called "Maria Elvira" with the Caracol network on GenTV channel, channel 8 of Miami television. The program came with the same previous format but only lasted a couple of months due to the sale of the channel and the program's closure.

Thanks to the fact that the channel belonged to the Caracol network, she was able to conduct interviews with the protagonists of the telenovela Pablo Escobar: El patrón del mal, which at that time was being filmed in Colombia and had great popularity with the Latin American public in general, and it opened the door to the high-security prison where Popeye, the hitman and right-hand man of Pablo Escobar, is imprisoned. He granted her several hours for an interview.

On March 19, 2013, she publishes on her website an interview granted to her by Cuban dissident and blogger Yoani Sánchez in New York City. Maria Elvira is the first and only Latin American journalist who managed to interview Yoani during her stay in the U.S. Following this interview, the executives of the Mega TV network, which María Elvira had left, were forced to negotiate the exclusive with her on the program of the also well-known host and presenter Jaime Bayly.

On August 19, she launches her Maria Elvira program on CNN Latino channel at 8:00 pm Miami time.

Publications
In 2009, she reached an agreement with Random House publishing house to write her first book 'If God is with you, who against you?', considered a bestseller in the main Hispanic states of the United States.

Awards
María Elvira has been awarded 5 Emmy Awards for different reports conducted in Nicaragua, Cuba, or Santo Domingo.