1 Peso Mercosur

Issued to mark the seventh anniversary of the Mercosur trading bloc — formally established by the Treaty of Asunción in March 1991 — this commemorative peso appeared at a moment of serious stress for the regional project. Brazil's currency crisis of 1998–99 would soon expose the structural tensions between Argentina's convertibility regime, which pegged the peso one-to-one with the US dollar, and Brazil's decision to float the real. The irony of a coin celebrating regional economic integration struck just before that integration nearly collapsed is hard to miss.