5 Centésimos

Panama's first national coinage was struck not in Panama but in the United States, produced at the Philadelphia Mint under contract following independence from Colombia in 1903. The new republic had no mint of its own and, critically, had just signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty granting the U.S. control of the Canal Zone — a political entanglement that made American mint production a near-foregone conclusion.

The silver content mirrors the contemporaneous U.S. coinage standard, a deliberate choice to facilitate exchange with American workers flooding into the isthmus for canal construction.