Carlos Saavedra Lamas

Carlos Saavedra Lamas (1878 to 1959) was an Argentine legal scholar, politician and diplomat who won the 1936 Nobel Peace Prize, the first Latin American recipient. Born in Buenos Aires, he took a doctorate in law at the University of Buenos Aires in 1903 and taught for more than four decades, specializing in labor legislation and international law, and later served as rector of the university from 1941 to 1943. He edited works on labor law, among them the three-volume Código nacional del trabajo of 1933, and in 1928 presided over the International Labour Organization conference in Geneva. As minister of Justice and Public Instruction from 1915 and foreign minister from 1932 to 1938 he drafted the 1933 Treaty of Nonaggression and Conciliation and helped mediate an end to the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay, and in 1936 he was elected president of the Assembly of the League of Nations.