1 Sol General amnesty, Manuel I. Belzú - Monetary Medal

Belzú issued this piece following the amnesty decree of 1848, a calculated political gesture aimed at stabilizing a Bolivia still convulsed by the factional violence that had brought him to power in the first place. His 1848 coup against Velasco was successful in part because of his unusual popularity among indigenous and mestizo populations — a base he cultivated aggressively through symbolic acts, of which this medal-coinage hybrid was one.

The Fonrobert reference places it firmly in the nineteenth-century South American political medal tradition, where the line between commemorative and circulating coinage was deliberately blurred for propagandistic effect.