2 Pesos

La Rioja's 2003 emergency notes were part of the wave of provincial quasi-currencies that proliferated after Argentina's December 2001 financial collapse and the freezing of bank deposits known as the "corralito." These provincial bonds — circulating as de facto money — filled the vacuum left when the peso was scarce and the federal government had lost the public's confidence entirely. La Rioja had issued similar instruments before; the province has a long history of fiscal dependency on federal transfers, making it particularly exposed when those flows disrupted.

Ángel Maza governed La Rioja from 1995 to 2007, one of the longer provincial tenures of that period.