5 Pesos

The Banco Nacional de la República de Colombia was established by law in 1880 as a state monopoly issuer, explicitly displacing the private banks that had dominated Colombian currency for the prior decade. This note falls within the bank's early emission period, when the institution was still consolidating that monopoly and private banks were actively resisting the transition — some continuing to issue their own notes illegally well into the mid-1880s.

Homer Lee Bank Note Company operated out of New York for only about a decade before being absorbed into the American Bank Note Company consolidation of 1891, making their Colombian work a relatively narrow window of production.