Hacienda tokens in Colombian numismatics

Exonumia and private money

Exonumia studies money-like objects that are not legal tender: tokens, vouchers, tickets, tallies, and checks. In Colombia those pieces document coffee, sugar, bananas, tobacco, and mining, and the labor relations those economies built.

A hacienda token is scrip. The employer issued it, not the state. It paid wages when official small coin ran short, and often it was accepted only at the store of the person who had issued it. By putting off cash, the issuer took a short loan from his own workers. The value was not in the metal. It was in the promise to redeem the piece, and in the estate of the person who made that promise.

The same fix also closed an economy. The worker was paid where he shopped, and sometimes he shopped on credit. Debt peonage was not equally harsh in every region, but the mechanism was real. It came apart in stages: first the paper of private banks, then the Banco de la República’s monopoly of banknotes, and at last the labor code of 1950.

Why private currency appeared

The token comes from a chronic shortage of fractional coin. People were scattered across a country split by three mountain chains, and the mint neither struck nor distributed enough small change to pay a day’s wage.

Exports without small change

Colombia entered the world market with tobacco, gold, coffee, and later sugar and bananas. The large properties needed hundreds or thousands of hands. Their owners earned foreign exchange and did not have low-denomination notes and coins for the weekly pay.

Gold and silver — escudos and reales — circulated mainly among merchants and in foreign trade. For a day laborer they were awkward. The way out was to issue metal tokens, vouchers, and tickets.

The commissary

The token was tied to the commissary, the estate or company store. In Mexico that store was called the tienda de raya. Often it was the only place that took the piece, so food, tools, and clothing were bought there.

The circuit could close. The employer kept legal coin and took the tokens back in his own store. When the wage fell short, buying on credit tied the worker to the property. In the banana zone the record is different, and it belongs in the section on the strike: there the United Fruit commissaries also competed with local trade.

Metals, holes, and denominations

A private token followed no official fineness, weight, or module. The metal and the quality of the die show what workshop the issuer could reach.

How they were made

• Metals struck at a mint or a workshop: copper, bronze, brass, and nickel silver, sometimes with heraldry and a beaded border. The EAFIT inventory says La Amalia’s money was struck in France.
• Aluminum, late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth: light, cheap, and slow to oxidize.
• What is not metal: vulcanite, celluloid, plastic, pressed card, and leather.
• Planchets and counterstamps: an issuer with few resources bought blank discs and punched the owner’s initials. An old token, or a worn coin, was also counterstamped when an estate changed hands.

The hole

Many tokens have a hole, sometimes opened by hand. It is not a mint error. It let the pieces be strung on a cord — they get lost in a coffee grove or a mine — and stacked in a dispenser on payday. On some types the hole changed the value of a piece that already existed.

What they measured

Official coin names abstract units: centavo, real, peso. Much agricultural scrip names the work or the harvest. The effort itself becomes the means of payment.

The commercial arroba in Colombia is 25 libras of 500 g, that is 12.5 kg. It is not the old Castilian arroba, which sits near 11.5 kg. Paying by the almud of cherries passed the risk of the grove to the picker: if the trees yielded less, the pay fell.

At La Amalia the printed unit is the tarro. The family glosses the T as the picking basket, on tokens of 1, 5, 10, and 20. Numista publishes a 1927 type, triangular brass, 22 mm and 2 g, legend “La Amalia 1 T,” and glosses tarro as bowl (N# 346977). Both readings are in print. This collection does not hold that piece.

Issuers that left a trail

Tokens turned up in nearly every producing region. A few issuers can be followed in an archive, in the press, and in a catalog.

Hacienda La Amalia, Venecia (Antioquia)

The EAFIT inventory places it in Venecia, founded in 1888 by Ignacio de Márquez and Amalia Madriñán de Márquez, a pioneer of coffee on a large scale and of exports to the United States and Europe. The same inventory says it had its own money, struck in France, circulating in the municipality. The estate papers, in the documentary-heritage room, cover 1927–1932 and are letters about running the farm, not a die register.

The press does not agree on the name or the size. Blu Radio and the family’s account say José Ignacio de Márquez; the inventory says Ignacio de Márquez. Caracol gives 238 hectares, Blu’s biographical note gives 228, and another Blu note gives 388. None of those sources produces a deed that settles the figure.

Blu Radio (25 March 2025) says Amalia Madriñán Vásquez was born in Guatemala in 1867, married in 1888, and was widowed in 1905, and that from then on she ran the estate alone. Caracol adds that she was raised in Popayán and was a cousin of Pedro Nel Ospina, the president who hired the Kemmerer mission. Those two statements stand as the press gives them, not as a baptismal record.

Emidgio Patiño, a Venecia councilman, told Blu Radio that the farm came to produce 20,000 arrobas of milled coffee for Holland and the United States, and that the panela covered the expenses. Caracol repeats that testimony. It is a resident’s word, not a cash book.

Patiño also says that on Saturday the tokens were collected and paid in pesos, and that in town one could shop with them and receive change. If that held, La Amalia’s token left the commissary and entered the trade of Venecia. Many families kept them as a souvenir. This case does not yet have one.

Sociedad del Zancudo, Titiribí

El Zancudo was the great mining company of nineteenth-century Antioquia. El Colombiano recalls the notes of fifty centavos and one peso, printed by the American Bank Note Company of New York, with the portrait of Carlos Coriolano Amador and a promise to pay the bearer at the offices in Titiribí and Medellín. Numista lists the peso as a local note, undated (1882), P# S909, N# 502776. It is not a Notofilia piece.

The same paper dates to 1888 the public burning of those notes in Parque de Berrío, before the mayor of Medellín, when the government of Carlos Holguín left the issue as a privilege of the Banco Nacional. Law 25 of 1923 did not retire them. Earlier comes Law 46 of 1898, which forbids the issue and circulation of private bond notes and of any document meant to replace paper money, and also the drafts of sectional governments. Private paper and the hacienda token did not share a fate. The token went on.

Manuelita, Palmira

The Banrepcultural encyclopedia records that in 1864 the estates La Rita and La Manuelita, of the family of George Henry Isaacs, Jorge Isaacs’s father, were sold at auction, and that Santiago Eder bought them. The company dates to 1901 its first steam works, able to grind 50 tons of cane a day, and calls it the second in South America. Cutting that cane took gangs of workers. The mill tokens Henao catalogs in the Valle include those of Ingenio San José. This page does not identify a Manuelita piece in the collection.

Viotá and the Tequendama

In Cundinamarca the coffee tokens are usually plain, copper or brass, with the owner’s initials or the name of the estate. Viotá later sat inside the agrarian conflict of the 1930s. Law 200 of 1936, under Alfonso López Pumarejo, recognized the good-faith possession of the person who worked the land. Parceling broke up many of the estates that had issued tokens. The town kept the nickname Viotá la Roja.

The banana zone of Magdalena

The United Fruit Company took the voucher and the commissary to another scale. Jorge Enrique Elías Caro writes that wages were paid in vouchers so that purchases would come out of the company’s commissaries, and that those stores sold as much as 20 percent cheaper than the local shopkeepers, in order to hold the wage down in times of dearness. The merchants of Ciénaga and the trading houses of Barranquilla lost that market. That is why they pushed the petition to demand an end to the vouchers. This is not the story of the expensive store. Here the record speaks of low prices and of a till that did not release coin.

Other regions

Issuers are also recorded in Santander, the coffee axis, Tolima, and the mining districts of Chocó and northeastern Antioquia. Panama, Colombian until 1903, is in Henao’s first edition. The E-Sylum notes it in July 2004: the book, out the previous autumn, covers isthmus tokens from when it was still Colombia.

Vouchers in the protest

Paying in vouchers was not only a cashier’s arrangement. In Magdalena, ending them was one demand of the 1928 strike.

Ciénaga, 1928

Elías Caro dates the stoppage to 12 November 1928, with more than 25,000 workers who refused to cut fruit. The nine-point petition was approved on 6 October at the assembly of the Unión Sindical de Trabajadores del Magdalena. It asked for compulsory collective insurance, compensation for accidents, hygienic housing and paid Sunday rest, a 50 percent raise for anyone earning less than 100 pesos a month, suppression of the commissaries, an end to loans in vouchers, weekly pay, abolition of the contractor system, and a better hospital service.

The company rejected the petition. In the early hours of 6 December the Army fired on the strikers in Ciénaga. The number of dead is still unset: the sources Elías Caro gathers run from about a hundred to more than a thousand, and they do not agree. Gabriel García Márquez restaged the night in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Elías Caro asks that the novel not be taken as the record of what happened.

From the token to the land

On the coffee estates of Cundinamarca and Tolima, the struggles before 1930 asked mainly for a better wage and a less rigid estate rule. In the 1930s the conflict moved to ownership. Law 200 did not ban the token. It broke up many of the estates that issued tokens, by recognizing the person who occupied and worked the land in good faith.

The Kemmerer mission did not ban the token

The 1923 mission created the Banco de la República and gave it the monopoly of banknotes. It did not eliminate hacienda tokens. Those lasted until labor law named them, in the 1950 code, in force from 1951.

Who came

In the early 1920s the public finances were in disorder, and in 1922 the Banco López failed. Pedro Nel Ospina hired a mission led by Edwin Walter Kemmerer, a Princeton professor. The Banco de la República’s volume of diaries names, beside him, Howard M. Jefferson on banking, Fred R. Fairchild on taxation, Thomas R. Lill on accounting, and Esteban Jaramillo as legal adviser.

The eight laws

Of ten bills, Congress passed eight. The list is that of Credencial Historia and of the Bank’s volume of diaries:

Law 42, article 82, is in force from 1 September 1923. That day the Contraloría began work.

What Law 25 actually did

Article 16 gave the Bank, for twenty years from the registration of the deed, the exclusive right to issue banknotes, in gold pesos of the weight and fineness in the Fiscal Code. Three points matter so that this law is not confused with the end of the tokens.

• Banknotes only. Striking stayed with the Ministry of Finance. The Colombia-Numismatics case keeps the double date for the Bogotá mint: 1946 on the Bank’s timeline and 1942 in the 1996 exhibition booklet.
• No forced currency in 1923. Article 17 said no one was obliged to take the notes, although they were legal money for criminal-law purposes and the public treasuries had to accept them while the Bank redeemed them for gold or for drafts.
• Law 82 of 1931, article 7, rewrote that article: while redemption continued, the notes would have unlimited liberatory power for every debt, unless a contract said otherwise. Liberatory power is not forced currency. Forced currency is the suspension of redemption in metal. The hacienda token is in neither text.

The 1950 code

The Substantive Labor Code does name the tokens. Not in articles 57 or 59 as the rule of payment, but in the title on wages.

How it was issued

Decree 2663 of 5 August 1950, under a state of siege, issued the code and set it to take effect on 1 January 1951. Decree 3743 of 20 December 1950 amended it and ordered an official edition with continuous numbering. Law 141 of 16 December 1961 adopted as statutes the state-of-siege decrees issued between 9 November 1949 and 20 July 1958, insofar as later statutes had not changed them.

The articles that matter

Article 136 is the one that says “tokens.” Articles 59 and 137 take down the compulsory commissary. Article 149 stops the store from collecting through the back door of a deduction. With that, the token ceased to be a wage and moved to the collector’s table.

Catalogs

The reference work is Fichas de Colombia, by Ignacio Alberto Henao Jaramillo. The E-Sylum places the first edition in late 2003, Panama included. The second edition is 2021: Henao’s blog corrects pieces “reported in the second edition.”

The catalog sorts by use — estates, trade, industry, mining, telephones, clubs, casinos, transport — and, within each use, by issuer in alphabetical order. Each entry brings obverse, reverse, a description, diameter, weight, and a rarity grade. It also prints a reference quotation. That column is not copied here.

On the blog, with help from other collectors, there are corrections this page takes from the blog itself and did not measure again:

• TEL 041-1, 041-2, and 041-3, long-distance tokens of the Empresa de Teléfonos de Bogotá. José Serna: 28.9 mm and 9.2 g; 24.4 mm and 6.3 g; 19.8 mm and 3.5 g.
• IND 064-1 and IND 064-2, two reverses of the “1 TA” token of Ingenio San José, struck in Medellín according to the blog. On 064-1 the condor’s wings are long, nearly to the rim; that one is the rare reverse. On 064-2 the wings are shorter, and it is the common one.
• IND 030-1, a token the blog links to the Compañía Industrial Unida de Cigarrillos of Medellín, a forerunner of Coltabaco.

Beside Henao, collectors use Jorge Emilio Restrepo, Coins of Colombia — Numista cites the 4th edition, of 2012 — to set private issues next to official coin, and Enrique Bernal’s catalog, Fichas de Colombia in the Numismalia series. Henao himself has a book of Banco de la República notes, 1923–2006, useful for the paper that took the place of private notes. Print runs and quotations from those books are not published here.

For anyone looking for them

There is almost never a record of how many were made. The issues were short, and many pieces were lost to damp, to work in the fields, or because the issuer called them in. Finding them with the relief intact is hard. This case does not yet hold a photographed hacienda token. The coscojas of Santander are something else: necessity coin of 1902, brass from cartridge cases, not an estate wage.

Copies, fantasies, and restrikes

They are cheap to make, and there is no official register to check them against. It helps to separate three cases:

• Counterfeit: a copy of a piece that did circulate, often cast rather than struck.
• Fantasy: an invented piece, with the name of a real or fictitious estate, that never circulated.
• Restrike: a piece made later, from original or copied dies.

How to look at them

1. Compare diameter, weight, and metal with Henao. A large difference is a warning.
2. Look at the surface with a glass. Casting leaves pits, soft edges, and mushy detail that a die does not produce.
3. Look for wear that fits use: the high relief more worn, a natural patina, holes with a used rim.
4. Be wary of a piece offered as rare and unworn, especially where no one stands behind the authenticity.
5. Ask for a provenance, and buy from someone who guarantees the piece.

Where to see collections

The Banco de la República has the Casa de Moneda Museum in Bogotá, Calle 11 no. 4-93. EAFIT’s documentary-heritage room holds the La Amalia papers (1927–1932). The printed history of El Zancudo is in El Colombiano and in the bulletins that cite the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango. None of those rooms is identified here as the owner of a specific token on this page.

Three closings, not one

The hacienda token tells the passage from fragmented money to a national coinage and to a wage the law requires in legal tender. It was born because the state could not supply enough small change. It served to pay, and also to hold people. It ended at the center of the banana strike of 1928.

The legal path has three steps, and they should not be melted together. Private paper was shut out by the Banco Nacional’s privilege — El Colombiano dates the Zancudo burning to 1888 — and by Law 46 of 1898. The Banco de la República’s monopoly of banknotes is Law 25 of 1923, and the broader liberatory power arrives with Law 82 of 1931, without touching the token. The express ban on paying wages with tokens is article 136 of the 1950 code, in force from 1 January 1951.

Today those pieces of brass, aluminum, and vulcanite are read as documents. The work of Henao, Restrepo, Bernal, and the people who correct the catalog on the blog is what makes it possible to name them without inventing a mintage.