50 Centavos

The Provincia de Buenos Aires issued these quasi-currency bonds in 2001 as the convertibility crisis tightened liquidity across Argentine provinces. Unable to access pesos freely pegged to the dollar, Buenos Aires began paying civil servants and contractors in these fractional patacones — the provincial scrip that briefly ran parallel to the national currency before the whole system collapsed in December 2001. The 50 centavos denomination was the smallest in the patacón series, used for everyday transactional change where the larger bonds were impractical.

Ciccone Calcográfica, then operating under its Compañía de Valores Sudamericana name at Don Torcuato, handled the full series. The firm had long printed Argentine security documents and understood what it was being asked to produce: an emergency instrument dressed up as normal paper currency.