By Xinhua
Bogota : Former president of Colombia Alfonso Lopez Michelson, who ruled the country from 1974 to 1978 and was also involved in peace talks between rebels and government forces, is dead.
Michelson died of a heart disease Wednesday at the age of 94, his family told the media.
As a distinguished politician and intellectual, his last days were spent in crafting a mooted humanitarian exchange between Colombian rebels and government forces and seeking an end to the nation's armed conflict.
Lopez was a forerunner of the Liberal Revolutionary Movement, which opposed the National Front in the 1950s. The Front and the Movement formed a system of government that set two traditional parties against each other and alternately took the presidency for years.
"It hurts me to know that he will not see the humanitarian exchange for which he fought in his last year," said another former Colombian President Ernesto Samper, who was also Lopez's close friend.
"Until he died, Lopez was a protagonist in the nation's political history. Every conversation with him was a lesson," Samper added.
Lopez also wrote the novel "The Chosen" (Los Eligidos), a harsh criticism of Colombia's political class.
He gained a law degree in a private university El Rosario here and a master's degree at the US university of Georgetown; and until 1952 he worked as an academic in Colombia's National University and another higher education institution La Liber and Rosario.