I've had these coins on my wantlist for ages, but hadn't had any luck seeing one around here. Just when I was beginning to suspect these coins didn't really exist, or they all got melted down, one pops up on the trays of a local dealer. He didn't know the story behind them, or that there was silver in that there coin.
In the early 1990's, the Mexican silver industry successfully lobbied the government to re-introduce silver into circulating currency - something that hadn't been seen in Mexican coinage since 1967, nor indeed anywhere in the world since the mid 1970's.
In an apparent attempt to discourage the coins going straight into the melting pot if the silver price spiked, they decided to make the new "silver" coins bimetallic: a silver core surrounded by a base metal (aluminium-bronze) ring.
Two denominations were issued: 10 new pesos (1992-1995, KM#553) and 20 new pesos (1993-1995, KM#561); the twenty peso is pictured above, and my specimen clearly saw circulation - I'd grade it something like gVF. Unfortunately, the experiment was unsuccessful either in seeing silver permanently restored to circulating coinage or in helping to stabilize the Mexican new peso. But by the time the series was halted in 1995, nearly 100 million 10 pesos and 35 million 20 pesos had been issued.
The replacement coins, issued in 1997 (10 pesos, KM#616) and 2000 (20 pesos, KM#637), were the same size and looked similar, but the cores were base metal (copper-nickel-brass) rather than silver.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
Posted 09/22/2006 5:09 pm
