Carlos Saavedra Lamas

Carlos Saavedra Lamas (1 November 1878 – 5 May 1959) was an Argentine academic and politician who served as Argentina's foreign minister from 1932 to 1938. A legal scholar specializing in labor legislation and international law, he also served as rector of the University of Buenos Aires. As foreign minister, he drafted the 1933 Treaty of Nonaggression and Conciliation and helped mediate an end to the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay, work for which he was awarded the 1936 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first Latin American recipient of the prize.

Biography Saavedra Lamas was born in Buenos Aires into a family descended from an early Argentine patriot, and he later married a daughter of Argentine president Roque Sáenz Peña. He became known both as a scholar of labor legislation and international law and, later, as Argentina's foreign minister, where he was credited with drafting international agreements and leading diplomatic mediation efforts.

As minister of Justice and Public Instruction from 1915, he reorganized the branches of public education and developed an intermediate-level curriculum for vocational and technical training. In 1935 he arranged mediation by six neutral American countries that ended the fighting between Paraguay and Bolivia, having already presented the South American Antiwar Pact to the League of Nations in 1934, where eleven countries signed it. In recognition of this work, he was elected president of the Assembly of the League of Nations in 1936. and comparable honors from other countries.

In March 2014 his solid gold Nobel medal was put up for auction after being found in a South American pawn shop.

In August 2014 a project for rebuying his Nobel medal by the Argentine Nation was presented at the Argentine congress. His auctioned medal was later won and is now owned by a private Asian collector.