5 Pesos

The Tesorería General issues of the 1880s were printed domestically at a time when most Latin American governments were still dependent on foreign firms — particularly American Bank Note Company and its rivals. Villaveces was one of the few Colombian printing houses capable of producing government paper currency in this period, which makes this note an artifact of deliberate economic self-sufficiency during a decade when the Regeneración government under Rafael Núñez was actively centralizing state functions and attempting to stabilize a chronically fractured monetary system.

The 1886 constitution and subsequent banking reforms directly preceded this issue. Núñez's government established the Banco Nacional de Colombia that same year and granted it a paper-money monopoly, yet Tesorería notes continued to appear alongside it — a contradiction that reflected how slowly the new financial architecture actually took hold in practice.