Mexican gaming law reform reaches its final stage
The reform of the Federal Law on Games and Lotteries has already passed through all the offices of the Mexican Executive and has only one stop left before the Congress of the Union. The Ministry of Interior (Secretaría de Gobernación) reported that the text finished its internal review by the federal Executive and is now in the hands of the National Security Cabinet, a step that defines the sending of an initiative designed to replace the law that has regulated the activity since 1947.
The origin of the project lies in an instruction from the Presidency of the Republic and was announced to the Chamber of Deputies in September 2025. The stated objective is to make all the agencies that currently have jurisdiction over casinos and sportsbooks work together, something that the current law does not contemplate because it was written with a different architecture – one of a general prohibition of gambling accompanied by the exclusive power of Segob to authorize and supervise establishments in the sector.
Rosa Icela Rodríguez used her management report to highlight the other front. The official stated that at the start of the administration, clear operating conditions were set for licensees, with the regularization of procedures conditioned on the disappearance of corrupt practices, and under warning of closing businesses and imprisoning colluding officials. Rodríguez also emphasized that the agency does not work with intermediaries or agents to resolve industry matters.
The result of that work has numbers. The joint work of Segob with the Attorney General's Office (Fiscalía General de la República) and the Financial Intelligence Unit (Unidad de Inteligencia Financiera), which reports to the Ministry of Finance (Secretaría de Hacienda), resulted in sanctions and the closure of irregular establishments, with 13 casinos shut down so far. The agency itself estimates that about 20 establishments have irregularities or open files, so the list could still grow.
That a gambling law passes through the security cabinet before Parliament says a lot about how Mexico frames the sector, more as a problem of money laundering and territorial control than as an economic activity to be regulated. The paradox is that the 1947 architecture, with its general prohibition and discretionary permits, is precisely what produced the authorization scheme that the reform claims to want to correct. The 13 closed casinos, for their part, should be read against the total number of authorized venues in the country, a figure that this report does not detail, and against the decline shown in the collection of the state casino tax in the State of Mexico during 2025, which suggests a retreating land-based market even before the new law arrives.
Tags: Federal Law on Gaming and Lotteries, SEGOB, casinos in Mexico, Rosa Icela Rodríguez