10 Centavos

Guatemala's 1881 coinage was produced under the liberal reform government of Justo Rufino Barrios, who had overhauled the national monetary system in the late 1870s to align it with the Latin Monetary Union's silver standards — a deliberate move to facilitate trade with European partners and neighboring republics. The mint at Guatemala City was the sole striking facility, operating under chronic supply constraints that make low-mintage years from this decade notoriously difficult to pin down in surviving records.

KM#204 represents one of the shorter-lived decimal silver types before subsequent reforms reworked the coinage yet again in the late 1880s.