10 Centavos

Peru's shift to brass for this series came directly out of wartime metal allocation pressures that persisted well into the late 1940s. Silver had long since been abandoned for small denomination coinage, and the brass composition adopted here was part of a broader postwar rationalization of the Peruvian monetary system under the Bustamante and then Odría administrations — two governments that could not have been more politically opposed, yet both presided over the same coinage without alteration.