5 Sucres Reduced size, Sucre looking right

Waterlow & Sons produced this series under contract at a point when the firm was already deep into the scandal that would destroy it — the Waterlow-Speyer affair had already been litigated, and the company was operating under the long shadow of the Portuguese escudo forgery case that had bankrupted the Bank of Portugal in the 1920s. By 1950, Waterlow was rebuilding its security printing reputation through exactly these kinds of South American central bank contracts.

The "reduced size" designation in the series name distinguishes it from the earlier, larger-format 5 Sucres notes and reflects a deliberate policy shift by the Banco Central toward more economical paper use in the postwar period. Pick #98 is the last distinct type in the 5 Sucres sequence before Ecuador redesigned the denomination entirely in the mid-1950s.