500 Pesos

This denomination emerged directly from Mexico's catastrophic debt crisis of 1982, when the government nationalized the banks and the peso entered a decade-long freefall. By the time this coin was being struck in the late 1980s, inflation had eroded purchasing power so severely that 500 pesos represented a fraction of what single-peso coins had bought a generation earlier. The series was ultimately rendered obsolete by the 1993 redenomination, which lopped three zeros off the currency and converted this 500-peso piece into half a "nuevo peso".