2 Nuevos Pesos FAO

Uruguay's 1981 FAO coinage was issued under the military dictatorship that had governed the country since 1973, a government that paradoxically embraced the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization coin program as a vehicle for projecting normalcy on the international stage. The FAO program, which ran globally from the late 1960s onward, encouraged member nations to issue coins with agricultural themes as a form of soft diplomacy around food security messaging.

The "Nuevos Pesos" designation itself reflects the 1975 monetary reform that replaced the original peso at 1,000-to-1.