María Elvira Salazar: “just days before the start of the 110th Congress, I had the great honor of traveling to Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador in…”

“just days before the start of the 110th Congress, I had the great honor of traveling to Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador in South America with our majority leader, Harry Reid, as well as four of my other colleagues: Senator Judd Gregg from New Hampshire, Senator Bob Bennett from Utah, Senator Kent Conrad from North Dakota, and Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois. It was a great and wonderful trip for me for a number of reasons. First, my own view is that over the last decade, and perhaps even more, this country has not paid enough attention to our relationship with Latin America and South America. For me, there is a special bond and relationship because of my own history in the Southwest of the United States. My family founded the city of Santa Fe, NM, now 409 years or four centuries ago. So before Plymouth Rock was founded or Jamestown was founded, my family was already living in what is now the northern part of the State of New Mexico. The place I come from still bears the same names that were put on those places by the Spaniards who settled northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.”