5 Pesos Plata Boliviana

Otero y Cía. was a private commercial house operating out of Córdoba, Argentina — not a bank in any chartered sense. Their issuing of denominated paper in 1868 placed them among dozens of provincial Argentine merchant firms that filled the vacuum left by the near-total absence of formal banking infrastructure in the interior. The Banco de la Provincia de Buenos Aires had no meaningful reach this far inland, and specie was chronically short.

The "Plata Boliviana" denomination is the telling detail: Bolivian silver reales and their derivatives remained the dominant transactional currency across the Argentine northwest well into the 1870s, and pegging the face value to that standard was a practical acknowledgment of what people actually counted with.