Alfonso López Michelsen
Alfonso López Michelsen was president of Colombia from 1974 to 1978, the first elected in open competition after the National Front's sixteen years. He was the son of the president López whose revolution on the march of the 1930s he had promised to resume and did not. He was the founder of the Liberal Revolutionary Movement that had fought the Front from the left and then joined it. He was the president under whom the marijuana bonanza and then the cocaine came into the country's economy and stayed. He was born in Bogotá, a lawyer of the Rosario college, and a professor of constitutional law. He was the founder in 1959 of the MRL, the Liberal dissidence that took a third of the party's vote in 1962 against the Front's monopoly and made its peace in 1967. Lleras Restrepo made him the first governor of the new department of Cesar and then foreign minister. He was the party's candidate in 1974 who beat the Conservative Gómez Hurtado by a million votes with the slogan of the mandato claro, the clear mandate. The four years were the economic emergency declared in September 1974, and the tax reform that was the most serious the country had tried. There was the coffee bonanza of 1976 and 1977 that flooded the country with dollars after the Brazilian frost. There was the marijuana money from the Guajira that flooded it with more and was laundered through the central bank's side window, the ventanilla siniestra. He opened it so that the dollars should at least pass through the state. There were the inflation of thirty per cent, and the civic strike of 14 September 1977 called by all four union federations against his wage policy, in which the army was sent into Bogotá and perhaps twenty died. The generals answered it with a memorandum demanding powers that his successor gave them. There were the M-19's theft of Bolívar's sword and the guerrillas' growth, and the corruption cases that touched his family and his ministers and were not tried. He ran again in 1982 and lost to Betancur, the first Liberal defeat in a generation, because the party had split. He was the party's elder for twenty-five years, writing a column and receiving the presidents. He died in Bogotá in July 2007, at ninety-four. He was the last president of the old Liberal families, whose father's revolution he had been born to finish and whose country had changed under him into one that the cartels and the guerrillas would fight over for the next thirty years.
- Lived: 1913 CE – 2007 CE
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: president, lawyer, politician
