5 Centavos

El Salvador's copper-nickel coinage of this period was produced almost entirely at the San Francisco and Philadelphia mints — the country maintained no domestic striking facility of its own. The 1940 introduction of this type coincided with the long authoritarian presidency of Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, whose government had suppressed the 1932 peasant uprising known as La Matanza with catastrophic violence. Fiscal stability was a deliberate political signal in that climate.

The type ran largely unchanged for over three decades, a span covering multiple military governments and the 1969 Football War with Honduras.