5 Pesos 1/2 Condor

Chile's decision to print its own currency domestically — through the state-operated Talleres de Especies Valoradas — rather than contracting abroad was a direct consequence of the peso's collapse during the Great Depression and the foreign exchange crisis that followed. By 1932, importing printed banknotes from Europe was both expensive and politically unacceptable. The Talleres had been established precisely to insulate Chile from that dependency.

The 5 Pesos / ½ Condor dual denomination reflects the transitional monetary arithmetic of the period, when the Condor unit — set at ten pesos — was being phased into everyday use alongside the older peso scale. Guillermo Subercaseaux, who appears across the later signature combinations, was a well-known economist and former rector of the Universidad de Chile, an unusual background for a central bank signatory.

The catalog date discrepancy for the June 1933 issue — 7th versus 17th — remains unresolved in published references.