Maria Elvira Salazar is a five-time Emmy award-winning broadcast veteran.
Presently, she is the sole anchor of MEGATV nightly news cast transmitted thru MEGA TV, one of the three Spanish-speaking TV networks in the US. Until 2015, she hosted her own daily prime-time news show called “Maria Elvira Live”, a true breakthrough in the Hispanic TV industry beating Univision and Telemundo’s telenovelas in the same time slot in key markets.
Salazar has established her reputation as a leading expert on Latin American affairs and the US Hispanic community by covering the major breaking news events in the past 25 years: Including the Argentinean transition to democracy, the Pinochet era in Chile, the regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba, Central- American wars, Iran-Contra scandal, First Gulf War, Bush Sr. White House, the rising of Hugo Chavez and Alvaro Uribe, the Immigration phenomenon in the United States, among many other topics. She also hosted an un- precedent-setting debate between the head of the Cuban Parliament, Ricardo Alarcon and the most prominent Cuban exile leader Jorge Mas-Canosa, which made international headlines. It has been the first and only public debate up-to-today between a high-ranking official of the Castro regime and the Cuban exile community in Miami.
She has interviewed an extraordinarily diverse collection of newsmakers: from Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush to global leaders like Alvaro Uribe of Columbia, Vicente Fox and Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico and the ex-President of Pakistan, Bhenazir Bhutto. Salazar was the first and ONLY , US Spanish-Language television journalist to obtain a one-on-one interview with Cuban leader Fidel Castro before his death.
Her much publicized interview with Chilean President Augusto Pinochet, the last one he ever granted to a news media , was later used by Chilean judicial authorities to prove General Pinochet’s competence to stand trial.
Prior to joining Mega TV in 2004, Salazar spent nine years at Telemundo News as their nightly-national newscast main anchorwoman and before as Senior Foreign Correspondent. For three years, she was Univision Network Central-American Bureau chief residing in El Salvador. Her assignments included covering the twelve year civil-war between the FMLN guerrilla movement and the Salvadorian government; in Nicaragua, the return to democracy with the election of Mrs. Violeta Chamorro and her political disputes with the Sandinista National Front; in Guatemala, also the political struggles with that country’s government and the URNG insurgency.
Before that, Mrs. Salazar was in Washington, D.C. as a political correspondent covering the Bush’s White House and the Pentagon for Univision Network.
In 1988, she anchored the first ever Spanish-language broadcast for CNN, becoming founding anchor for CNN Español.
Salazar began her career in broadcasting in 1984 as a local reporter, for Channel 23, Univision Network affiliate in Miami. At the beginning of 2010, Salazar signed a deal with Random House to write her first book: “Si Dios Contigo, Quien Contra Ti? which proved to be an instant best seller. The first edition was sold out in the first three months.
Salazar was born in Miami, Florida to Cuban parents and spent part of her childhood in Puerto Rico. She holds a B.A. in Communication from the University of Miami and earned her Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Harvard University‘s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She lives in Miami with her two daughters, Nicoletta and Martina.