100 Pesos

One of the earliest paper instruments issued in the Río de la Plata region, this note predates the Banco de la Provincia de Buenos Aires by six years. The Ministerio de Hacienda was operating under severe fiscal pressure in the early 1820s — the provincial government had inherited colonial debts, lacked hard currency reserves, and was funding a nascent state apparatus almost entirely through customs revenue collected at the port. These notes were, in effect, an advance against expected tariff income.

Manuscript signatures and an impressed or hand-stamped official seal were the only security measures available locally. That combination also makes forgery detection unreliable on surviving examples, so provenance matters.