25 Pesos

Colombia's 1904 issues came at a painful moment — the country had just emerged from the Thousand Days War (1899–1902), one of the bloodiest civil conflicts in its history, and the peso itself had been catastrophically debased. At the war's peak, the government was printing unbacked paper currency in quantities that drove inflation into the thousands of percent. The Waterlow & Sons contract represented an attempt to restore credibility through externally produced, security-printed notes after years of domestic emergency issues.

Waterlow had been printing for Latin American governments since the mid-nineteenth century and was a natural choice for a republic trying to signal fiscal rehabilitation to foreign creditors. Whether it succeeded is another matter — Colombia's monetary situation remained unstable well into the following decade.