5 Dollars Jamaica act, with horizontal bars

The "horizontal bars" designation in the catalog refers to a security overprint applied across the face of this series — a modification introduced mid-run to combat counterfeiting that had become a documented problem with the earlier plain-face issues. It's a functional intervention, not a design choice, and it divides collector interest sharply between those who want the cleaner earlier printing and those specifically tracking the security upgrade sequence.

De La Rue printed this series throughout under the Jamaica (Banking) Act, a piece of legislation that governed note issuance well into the period when the Jamaican dollar was under sustained devaluation pressure — the exchange rate collapsed from roughly 5 JMD to the US dollar in 1985 to over 20 by 1992.