1 Bolívar

By 1989, the 1 Bolívar note was an anachronism. Inflation had so thoroughly eroded Venezuela's purchasing power that the denomination was functionally worthless in daily commerce — a coin would have sufficed, and eventually did. The Banco Central kept issuing small-denomination paper well past the point of practical utility, a pattern common to Latin American central banks facing structural inflation rather than acute crisis.

Bundesdruckerei, the German federal printer, held the Venezuela contract through much of this period. Their intaglio work on low-denomination notes of this era is technically consistent, though the 1 Bolívar series attracted little collector attention precisely because it circulated heavily and wore fast.