500 000 Intis segmented foil security thread

Peru's inflation crisis of the late 1980s was among the worst in Latin American history — by 1990, the cumulative rate had exceeded two million percent. The 500,000 Intis denomination is a direct artifact of that collapse; the Inti itself had replaced the Sol in 1985 at 1,000-to-1, and was in turn replaced by the Nuevo Sol in 1991 at another 1,000,000-to-1. A note worth half a million of a currency already born from devaluation tells the arithmetic of the crisis plainly enough.

The segmented foil security thread — rather than the simpler embedded continuous thread used on earlier Inti issues — reflects De La Rue's mid-to-late 1980s push to upgrade anti-counterfeiting specification on high-denomination emergency printings for hyperinflationary markets.