50 Centavos Banco de Rio Hacha - Reverse Proof

The Banco de Rio Hacha was one of Colombia's short-lived regional private banks authorized under the 1865 banking law, operating out of a small Caribbean coastal town whose commercial importance rested almost entirely on contraband trade and the intermittent export of dividivi — a tanning bark. That a bank headquartered there commissioned notes from the American Bank Note Company in New York speaks more to the prestige signaling common among minor Colombian issuers of the period than to any substantial local financial activity.

A reverse proof from ABNC's archives — printed on card or india paper in a single color without the completed face — would have been retained as a production record, never intended for circulation. These archive pulls are the primary surviving evidence of many Colombian provincial issues that saw little or no actual use in the field.