0.50 Quetzal Banco De Guatemala

Waterlow & Sons had been printing Guatemalan banknotes since the 1920s, and this half-quetzal belongs to the first series issued by Banco de Guatemala following its establishment in 1945 — the institution created when Guatemala's 1944 revolution under Arévalo dismantled the old Caja Reguladora system and centralized currency authority for the first time. The quetzal itself had been pegged one-to-one with the US dollar since 1925, a parity that held with unusual stubbornness for decades.

Waterlow collapsed into scandal in 1953 following the Portuguese escudo forgery affair, making this a late-period product of a firm already in institutional decline.