1 Peso Fuerte Tesoro Nacional

Paraguay's Tesoro Nacional issued this note in 1864, just one year before the country entered the War of the Triple Alliance — the catastrophic five-year conflict against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay that killed the majority of Paraguay's adult male population and effectively destroyed the national economy. Notes issued in this immediate pre-war period were quickly swept into a wartime fiscal emergency that Francisco Solano López's government tried to paper over with successive issues of increasingly desperate currency.

Perkins Bacon had a long-established relationship with Latin American governments and brought their security printing expertise to this series. The intaglio work is characteristic of their mid-Victorian output.