50 Centavos

This note was issued by the treasury of Antioquia department during the Thousand Days War, Colombia's catastrophic civil conflict of 1899–1902 that killed an estimated 100,000 people and left the national monetary system in pieces. Regional authorities across the country resorted to issuing their own emergency paper as the Bogotá government's finances collapsed entirely. Antioquia, relatively prosperous and geographically insular, had more administrative capacity than most departments to do this in an organized way.

Printed locally by the Medellín press Imprenta de La Verdad, the note was signed in manuscript by two named departmental treasury officials — a level of bureaucratic formality that distinguishes it from cruder wartime issues elsewhere in Colombia.