"Humanitarian aid across the ocean: The activities of the Argentine Red Cross during the Great War"

MARÍA INÉS TATO

Dublín

Conferencia; Conference Humanitarianism and the "Greater War", 1912-1923; 2019

University College Dublin

The First World War represented a landmark in the development of humanitarianism, due to the unprecedented scale of destruction and mass violence unleashed by the industrial warfare, affecting equally combatants and civilians. As a result, mitigating its effects required humanitarian aid in huge proportions, set into motion by complex national and transnational networks of solidarity. The material aid delivered to Europe combined public and private initiatives for the relief of wounded soldiers and civilians during the conflict and for the reconstruction effort after the armistice. Neutral Argentina participated in this global humanitarian action through numerous fundraising campaigns and the enlistment of women and men as volunteers to serve as doctors, nurses and stretcher-bearers in the battlefields. As other Latin American countries, Argentina was linked to Europe through strong historical, cultural, economic and demographic connections: It was a former colony of Spain; the United Kingdom?s major commercial partner in South America; the second immigration country in the Americas, behind the United States; and an ardent admirer of republican France. Consequently, the First World War had a deep impact at different levels, which explains the high degree of social mobilization around the conflict and the humanitarian activism deployed by civil society. The Argentine relief efforts directed to the Old Continent during and after the Great War have not been systematically explored yet. This paper aims to explore the humanitarian activities performed by the Argentine Red Cross in wartime; to reconstruct the mechanisms and circuits of cooperation with the International Red Cross Committee (ICRC), and to analyse its relationships with its equals from neutral and belligerent countries operating in Argentina. The analysis will be based mainly on institutional materials from the Argentine Red Cross? archive.