10 Lempiras

The P#70 series ran through the 1980s and into the early 1990s as Honduras navigated severe fiscal pressure — the country was among the most heavily indebted in Central America relative to GDP, and the Banco Central was managing chronic dollar shortages partly through tightly controlled domestic currency issuance. Thomas De La Rue had held the Honduran printing contract for decades by this point, a relationship that gave the series a consistency of physical quality that outlasted the economic turbulence surrounding it.

Watermark-only security on a De La Rue note of this period is notably light. By 1989, the firm was routinely incorporating security threads into comparable Latin American issues.