5 Venezolanos

The Compañía de Crédito was one of several private Venezuelan banks authorized to issue notes during the brief liberal banking experiment of the early 1870s under Guzmán Blanco. The arrangement gave commercial houses quasi-banking privileges while the state avoided the burden of establishing a formal national bank — a compromise that lasted only a few years before tighter concession controls were imposed.

ABNC's involvement here is routine for the period; New York was the default source for quality intaglio work across Latin America at the time. The "Venezolanos" denomination — rather than pesos or reales — reflects Venezuela's own currency nomenclature of the era, before the bolívar was formally adopted in 1879.