1 Centavo de Boliviano overprinted on P# 169

Bolivia's 1987 centavo notes were born from catastrophe. The country had just lived through one of the worst hyperinflationary episodes in Latin American history — by 1985, annual inflation had exceeded 20,000%. The peso boliviano was abolished and replaced by the new boliviano at a conversion rate of one million to one, which meant that existing peso stock had to be hastily overprinted and redenominated rather than replaced outright. This note is a direct artifact of that fiscal emergency: old Bundesdruckerei-printed peso sheets pressed back into service with a new identity stamped over the old denomination.

The centavo itself was a subdivision almost never seen in daily use — by the time these circulated, even the smallest transactions had moved well past single-centavo values.