Between Struggles and Factions: the Argentine Red Cross (1864-1914)

Abstract

This article analyzes the development of the Argentine Red Cross from its appearance until the First World War. Its organization in Argentina was linked to the struggles between different ethnic associations and medical corporations, both involved in interventions and civil wars that affected the inland provinces and Buenos Aires between the late Nineteenth-Century and the early Twentieth-Century. In an international organization whose objective was humanitarian aid and supposedly neutral, the main actors that carried out in this institution during this period assumed different political and ideological positions, although they had in common their social belonging and masculine solidarity. Their functions increased from the attention of victims of armed conflicts to their care in times of peace catastrophes, which meant an important modification in the principles and in the social organization and intervention. At the same time, their interest in the "calamities" produced in neighboring countries, as well as the problems with the belligerent countries during the Great War, delimited the scope of this institution with international goals and objectives.