Alfonso López Michelsen (30 June 1913 – 11 July 2007) was a Colombian politician and lawyer who served as the 24th President of Colombia from 1974 to 1978. He was nicknamed "El Pollo" (The Chicken), a popular Colombian idiom for people with precocious careers. Early years López was the son of former two-time president of Colombia, Alfonso López Pumarejo and his first wife María Michelsen Lombana. He was born and raised in Bogotá. He studied at the Gimnasio Moderno School and later in other cities: Paris, Brussels, London and Santiago de Chile. He graduated with a degree in law from the Universidad del Rosario. During his father's presidency, López maintained a low profile in politics and instead focused on becoming a university professor at the Universidad del Rosario. In 1938, López married Cecilia Caballero Blanco in Bogotá and they had three sons. They moved to the outskirts of Bogotá in a hacienda in the then municipality of Engativá, Cundinamarca Department (nowadays a Locality of Bogotá). Settled in this town, López had his first experience of politics becoming a town councilman. During this time, his fellow councilmen included two other politicians who went on to become key political players in the country, Álvaro Gómez Hurtado and future president Julio César Turbay Ayala. Political career In 1959, a group of his former college students founded the Liberal Revolutionary Movement (MRL) as a reaction against the pact between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party to create the National Front, in which the two parties took turns to govern. López Michelsen was then offered the leadership of the newly created MRL and he accepted, becoming a presidential candidate for the 1962 presidential elections. López lost the election by a large margin to Conservative candidate Guillermo León Valencia. Governor of the Department of Cesar (1967–1968) In 1966, López was elected as a senator and negotiated the return of the MRL to the Liberal Party in 1967. This same year López traveled to the city of Valledupar after being appointed by President Carlos Lleras Restrepo as the first governor of Cesar Department, a newly created province in the northern Caribbean Region of Colombia. López was able to trace his grandmothers' family ancestors "the Pumarejos," back to this town. During those years, he was also instrumental in the creation of the Vallenato Legend Festival (nowadays, one of the most important cultural events in Colombia) along with