1 Centavo

El Salvador's centavo coinage of this period was produced almost entirely by foreign mints — Birmingham's Heaton Mint struck the bulk of these issues, as the country maintained no domestic minting capacity. The KM#127 type spans a politically turbulent stretch that includes the 1932 Matanza, when General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez suppressed a peasant uprising with mass killings estimated in the tens of thousands, an event that reshaped Salvadoran governance for decades.

The copper-nickel alloy was a deliberate shift away from the pure copper centavos of earlier decades, chosen for durability in tropical circulation conditions.