100 Australes

La Rioja's provincial australes were issued under the emergency financing arrangements that several Argentine provinces adopted in the mid-1980s as the federal government struggled with chronic fiscal shortfalls. These notes functioned as quasi-money — technically obligations of the province rather than legal tender in the national sense, yet accepted locally by administrative necessity. The Casa de Moneda printing is routine for the series, but the inclusion of a barcode as a security feature is worth noting: relatively few provincial emergency issues of this period incorporated machine-readable elements.

La Rioja was among the smaller provincial issuers, and lower-denomination australes from this series circulated hard and survived poorly.