DRAGO, LUIS MARA

born May 6, 1859, Buenos Aires died June 9, 1921, Buenos Aires statesman and author of the Drago Doctrine, which opposed the forcible collection of debts through military intervention in any South American republic. A member of a distinguished Argentine family, Drago began his career as a newspaper editor. He later served as Argentine financial officer and then as minister of foreign affairs (1902). At that time, when Great Britain, Germany, and Italy were seeking to collect the public debt of Venezuela by force, he wrote to the Argentine minister in Washington setting forth his doctrine. Drago represented Argentina at the Hague Peace Conference in 1907 and two years later served on the arbitration tribunal that decided the famous North Atlantic Coast Fisheries case (1910) between Britain and the U.S. He died shortly after he had been invited by the League of Nations to draft the statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice.