20 Centavos

The Banco Nacional de los Estados Unidos de Colombia was a short-lived state institution, established in 1880 and dissolved after the currency chaos that followed the War of a Thousand Days. The 1885 date is significant: the country was in the middle of a civil war that year — the Revolution of 1885 — which accelerated the bank's shift toward forced-currency policies and ultimately contributed to the inflationary spiral of the late 1880s and 1890s.

Printed locally by Litografía D. Paredes in Bogotá rather than contracted abroad, this fractional note reflects the logistical pressures of wartime monetary production. Domestic lithography of this period rarely matched European intaglio standards, and small-denomination issues like this one were the most prone to crude counterfeiting.