10 Centésimos

Private merchant notes circulated widely in Uruguay's interior during the 1860s and 1870s, filling a vacuum left by the near-total absence of branch banking outside Montevideo. Tacuarembó, a departmental capital in the rural northeast, had no chartered bank until well into the following decade, so estancieros and merchants like Valdez issued fiduciary scrip redeemable against their own commercial credit — essentially a personal promise backed by cattle, land, or trade goods rather than specie reserves.

The legal standing of such emissions was perpetually ambiguous under Uruguayan commercial law of the period.