50 Centavos

Nicaragua's coinage underwent a material shift in the early 1980s as the Sandinista government, facing crippling foreign debt and a U.S. trade embargo, could no longer reliably source or afford the nickel required for earlier alloys. The switch to nickel clad steel was a fiscal necessity, not a design decision.

KM#42a distinguishes this clad version from its predecessor. The embargo's downstream effects on raw material procurement made even minor metallurgical changes a matter of state economics.