20 Centavos Rui Barbosa

Rui Barbosa spent decades as Brazil's foremost liberal jurist and twice ran unsuccessfully for the presidency, yet it was his role at the 1907 Hague Peace Conference — where he argued, against considerable diplomatic pressure, that small nations deserved equal standing with great powers — that earned him the epithet "the Eagle of The Hague." The aluminium bronze alloy adopted for this series was a postwar practicality; wartime copper shortages had already pushed Brazilian coinage through several compositional experiments in the early 1940s, and the new alloy offered durability without returning to a metal still in tight industrial demand.