20 Pesos Fuertes

Banco J. Benites é Hijo was a private provincial bank operating in Argentina during the brief window when individual commercial houses could issue their own currency — a practice the national government moved aggressively to curtail through the 1870s and 1880s. Notes from this issuer are rare survivors of that pre-consolidation period, when monetary authority was genuinely fragmented across dozens of private and regional institutions.

The American Bank Note Company contract is unremarkable for Argentine private banking paper of this decade — ABNC held a near-monopoly on quality intaglio work for South American issuers throughout the 1860s. What distinguishes PS#1564 is simply the obscurity of the issuing house itself: Benites é Hijo left almost no documentary trace, and the full scope of their note-issuing activity remains poorly catalogued.