50 Quetzales

Guatemala's 50 quetzal notes of this period were circulating during some of the most violent years of the internal armed conflict, when the military governments of Ríos Montt and then Mejía Víctores were conducting counterinsurgency campaigns in the highlands. Giesecke & Devrient had a longstanding relationship with the Banco de Guatemala going back decades, and Munich-printed notes were the norm for higher denominations throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

The P#70 series ran across four years with minimal design changes — date variations are the primary distinguishing factor between issues, and the 1983 examples are notably less common than those dated 1986 or 1987.