5 Bolivianos

The Banco Mercantil was one of several Bolivian private banks authorized to issue notes under the country's decentralized banking regime of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That system collapsed definitively with the 1914 banking reforms, which concentrated note-issuing authority and effectively ended the circulation life of privately issued paper like this series. Notes that weren't redeemed were simply withdrawn and destroyed, which accounts for the relative scarcity of surviving Mercantil examples in any grade.

ABNC's contract work for Bolivian private banks during this period typically involved shared plate elements across multiple clients — worth checking against the S174 and S175 entries for overlapping border or vignette tooling.