The Conversion Office
With the purpose of preventing issues without metallic backing and constituting a reserve that might facilitate the convertibility of the circulating money, the Argentine government decided to establish an issuing institute that would act under the name of the title of this article. The Law of Creation´s number is 2741, dated October 7, 1890, which was when Dr. Carlos Pellegrini occupied the first magistrate of the country with his Ministry of Finance being Vicente Fidel López.
A few years under the establishment of the Conversion Office, on January 8, 1894, Law Number 3062 was pronounced, which introduced the denomination "peso moneda nacional" (national peso currency) which lasted for more than 75 years.
Another accompanying law was the Law of Conversion, Number 3871, dated 1899. This law prepared for the conversion of "all present fiduciary printings of legal tender banknotes into national money backed by gold, in exchange for a legal tender national peso for forty-four centavos in national pesos gold sealed".
Regarding their issues, the first banknotes of the Caja were fifty pesos with the figure of Juárez Celman and five hundred pesos with the portrait of Manuel Belgrano, over the design of the banknotes of guaranteed banks. Additionally, it put into circulation fractional denominations between five and fifty centavos through the interim of the Bank of the Argentine Nation.
In 1895 there was a new issue of denominations in centavos and pesos up to one thousand.
Law number 3505, dated September 20, 1897, authorized the Executive Power through the Conversion Office to completely renovate the fiduciary circulation which forced that office to issue new bills whose principal design characteristic was the inclusion on the left side of the face of the bill, of an allegory whose official name was "Progress". It is important to point out that this vignette was used on our paper money that varied between 50 centavos to 1000 pesos "national currency" from 1899 to the decade of the 1940´s, surviving the institution that created it since the Conversion Office disappeared in 1935, when it was substituted by the Central Bank of the Republic. The five peso design remained intact until 1959.