The History of Gambling in Mexico

Last updated July 2026 · Casino Capybara editorial team

Mexico’s gambling law rests on a single federal statute, the Ley Federal de Juegos y Sorteos (Federal Law of Games and Lotteries, LFJS), enacted on 31 December 1947 and never comprehensively replaced. The 1947 law bans games of chance and betting outright, then permits only a short, named list of exceptions — chess, dominoes, dice, billiards, bowling, pelota, races and official sorteos (draws or raffles) — leaving casinos, slot machines, roulette and card games with no explicit legal basis of their own. Since a 2004 regulation, permit holders have operated slot-machine halls and full casino floors by classifying them as salas de sorteos de números (number-draw halls), a legal fiction that has expanded quietly for two decades. As of mid-2026 that fiction is under direct challenge: a November 2023 presidential decree curbing new slot-machine permits awaits a Supreme Court ruling on its constitutionality, while President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government has separately promised to modernise the entire framework to capture online betting.

Before the law: patolli and the colonial lottery

Patolli was a board-and-dice betting game played across Mesoamerica — by Toltecs, Maya, Aztecs and other peoples — long before the Spanish conquest. Two players moved pieces around an X-shaped board of 52 spaces using marked beans as dice, wagering goods such as cloth, food, precious stones and gold jewellery. Both commoners (macehualli) and nobility (pilli) played it. Spanish missionaries who arrived with the conquistadors banned the game, branding it idolatrous and calling it “the game of demons”; it survived only in folk memory until the anthropologist Alfonso Caso documented and revived interest in it during the twentieth century.

Formal, state-sanctioned gambling in Mexico begins with the lottery. On 7 August 1770, King Carlos III of Spain authorised the creation of the Real Lotería General de la Nueva España, and the first draw was held on 13 May 1771 in the old town-council palace on Mexico City’s Zócalo. It is generally described as the oldest lottery in Latin America. From 1781 its profits began funding public charity, a mission that has run through every subsequent incarnation of the institution. The lottery was suspended during the Revolution — Venustiano Carranza halted operations in 1915 — and restored in 1920 under Adolfo de la Huerta. It later took the name Lotería Nacional para la Asistencia Pública and, after a 1985 organic law formalised it as a decentralised federal body, operated under that structure until a 2020 decree merged it into the state sports-pool operator, Pronósticos para la Asistencia Pública (itself created by decree on 24 February 1978).

The nineteenth century: ports, foreign visitors and the Porfiriato boom

Through the nineteenth century, Mexican ports with heavy foreign traffic — Veracruz, Acapulco, Mazatlán — became informal gambling hubs, serving merchants, sailors and a transient cosmopolitan population that wanted the card rooms and betting parlours they knew from abroad. The trend accelerated under the long presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), when casinos modelled on Parisian gaming houses spread through Mexican cities as part of a broader import of European high society customs. Horse racing and its associated betting culture flourished alongside this: Mexico City’s elite founded jockey clubs where wagering was a central social activity, including the Hipódromo de Indianilla, which opened in 1895 with costly imported equipment for computing bets. This belle-époque gambling culture collapsed with the Díaz regime itself, swept away by the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910–1911.

Revolution, the Agua Caliente era and the 1935 closure

Gambling did not disappear after the Revolution — it moved to the border. The best-known example is the Agua Caliente casino and resort near Tijuana, opened in 1928 by American investors in partnership with General Abelardo L. Rodríguez, then military commander and governor of Baja California and later President of Mexico (1932–1934). Built to draw wealthy visitors and Hollywood stars from nearby California during US Prohibition, Agua Caliente became one of the most famous gambling resorts in North America.

That era ended under President Lázaro Cárdenas. Multiple secondary accounts date a presidential order shutting down the country’s casinos to 1935, and name Agua Caliente in Tijuana, El Tecolote in Mexico City, the Foreign Club in Naucalpan and the Casino de la Selva in Cuernavaca among the establishments closed; the Agua Caliente property was later expropriated by the state and converted to educational use. The precise decree text and its exact Diario Oficial citation could not be verified directly for this article — government legal-archive sites were unreachable during research — and a small number of sources instead place a related abolition order in 1938, so both the exact date and the underlying instrument should be treated as not fully confirmed. What is not in dispute is the outcome: by the mid-1930s, casino gambling in Mexico had gone from openly tolerated to officially proscribed, and it stayed that way — on paper — for the rest of the century.

The Ley Federal de Juegos y Sorteos (1947)

Twelve years after the Cárdenas-era closures, Congress codified the prohibition into permanent federal law. The Ley Federal de Juegos y Sorteos was published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on 31 December 1947 and signed by President Miguel Alemán on 30 December 1947. It remains in force today, unreformed in its core articles, which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating gambling statutes in the Americas.

What the law actually permits

Article 1 states the general rule bluntly: “games of chance and games with betting are prohibited throughout the national territory” (quedan prohibidos… los juegos de azar y los juegos con apuestas). Article 2 then lists the only games that may be permitted:

Chess, checkers and similar games; dominoes, dice, bowling, ninepins and billiards;
Pelota in all its forms and denominations;
Races of people, vehicles and animals, and sport in general; and
Sorteos (official draws/raffles).

Crucially, the article closes with a catch-all: “games not listed shall be considered prohibited for the purposes of this Law.” Roulette, card games such as baccarat and poker, and — obviously, since they did not exist in any regulated form in 1947 — slot machines, appear nowhere on that list. This is the seed of the legal ambiguity that still defines Mexican casino regulation nearly eighty years later: the statute that supposedly governs “casinos” never actually authorises the games most casinos are built around.

Permits, Gobernación’s discretion and penalties

Article 3 gives the Secretaría de Gobernación (the Interior Ministry) federal authority to regulate, authorise, control and monitor any game involving betting, and any sorteo, with one carve-out: the national lottery, governed by its own law. Article 4 makes the point operational — no premises, open or closed, may host betting games or draws of any kind without a Gobernación permit, and the Ministry sets the conditions case by case. Article 5 lets Gobernación claim a share of a permit holder’s proceeds for federal social-assistance institutions, on top of ordinary taxes. Article 9 bars gaming venues from operating near schools or workplaces, and Article 11 lets Gobernación authorise “cruce de apuestas” (cross-betting) at regional fairs, in spectacles the implementing regulation defines. Penalties in Articles 12–14 range from fines to three years’ imprisonment and forfeiture of gaming equipment and proceeds for operating without authorisation.

In effect, the 1947 law does not create a licensing regime for casinos as a category — it creates a discretionary permitting power for Gobernación to authorise narrow, named exceptions to a blanket prohibition. Everything that followed, including the modern casino floor, had to be built on top of that discretion rather than on any express statutory right to operate a casino.

Decades of permisos: how a casino industry grew without a casino law

For the following half-century, Mexico’s gambling sector existed mainly through individual, discretionary permits issued to racetracks, dog tracks and frontones (Basque pelota courts), plus a handful of number-draw operations. Because the statute names no casino licence, the industry that eventually formed depended entirely on how expansively Gobernación chose to interpret Article 2’s exceptions — and on political relationships, since a permit was a ministerial grant rather than an entitlement. This produced a sector shaped less by statute than by administrative practice, with permit terms, renewal conditions and permitted-game lists effectively set case by case rather than by published rule until the early 2000s.

The 2004 Reglamento and the “sorteos de números” fiction

The turning point was the Reglamento de la Ley Federal de Juegos y Sorteos, published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on 17 September 2004. Its stated purpose was to regulate the authorisation, control, oversight and inspection of games involving betting and of sorteos in all their modalities (again excluding the national lottery), and it gave the Dirección General de Juegos y Sorteos (DGJS), a unit of Gobernación, explicit competence to process and resolve permit matters.

What the 2004 Reglamento did in practice was reinterpret Article 2’s second category — sorteos — broadly enough to accommodate modern casino-style gaming. A slot machine or an electronic roulette wheel, on this reading, is simply a mechanised, repeated “number draw”: the player selects or is assigned numbers or symbols, and a randomiser determines the result, structurally analogous to a raffle rather than to the card and dice games the 1947 law never authorised. Under this theory, permit holders could open salas de sorteos de números — number-draw halls — that functioned, to the ordinary visitor, exactly like casino floors. The Reglamento also let Gobernación grant permits for centros de apuestas remotas (remote betting centres, commonly called “libros foráneos” or foreign books) as a complement to existing racetrack, dog-track or frontón permits, provided racing or pelota remained the permit holder’s principal activity. It set rules barring credit extension to bettors, requiring permit numbers on all advertising, and prohibiting entry to minors.

This “sorteos de números” theory has never been struck down, but it has also never been placed beyond legal doubt — it is an administrative interpretation of a seventy-plus-year-old statute, not a fresh statutory authorisation, and that gap is precisely what later litigation over slot machines would exploit from both directions: operators relying on it to justify decades of expansion, and the federal government relying on its administrative, reglamento-level status to restrict it again by decree rather than by Act of Congress.

Grupo Caliente and the major permit holders

The best-known name in Mexican gaming is Grupo Caliente, whose roots trace to the Hipódromo Agua Caliente / Tijuana Jockey Club, founded in the Tijuana area in 1916 by the American sports promoter James Wood “Sunny Jim” Coffroth. The modern Caliente brand — casinos, sports-betting shops and an online platform — took its present shape under Jorge Hank Rhon, who built it into Mexico’s largest gaming operator, with reporting describing roughly 200 betting and gaming outlets under the Caliente name in Mexico and several other Latin American and Caribbean markets by the early 2020s. Grupo Caliente’s expansion under Hank Rhon has repeatedly drawn political controversy, including reporting that permits linked to Impulsora Géminis — a company whose shareholders include Hank Rhon — had their terms extended, in some accounts to indefinite duration, under the current federal administration.

Beyond Caliente, the Mexican gaming sector by the 2020s comprised several dozen permit-holding operators running several hundred physical establishments between them — casinos, number-draw halls and remote betting centres attached to racetracks and frontones — though Gobernación’s own public disclosure of exact, current permit and establishment counts has been criticised by legislators as incomplete.

Sports betting: hipódromos, galgódromos, frontones and libros foráneos

Sports betting in Mexico has always been anchored to physical spectacle venues rather than existing as a freestanding licence category. Under the 2004 Reglamento, a centro de apuestas remotas — a shop that takes wagers on races and sports relayed by live video and audio, i.e. a sportsbook — can only be authorised as a complement to an existing racetrack, dog-track or frontón permit, and only where live racing or pelota remains that permit holder’s core business. This is the legal route by which Grupo Caliente’s sportsbook network and similar operators built out betting-shop chains across the country: each shop’s authorisation is formally tied back to a racing or pelota permit rather than existing independently. Wagers taken on-site at racetracks, dog tracks and frontones, as well as bets placed at affiliated remote betting centres, have separately been reported as carrying their own gaming-tax treatment under federal fiscal rules.

Repeated, failed attempts at a modern gaming law

The 1947 law’s age is not for want of trying to replace it. Industry and legal commentary describes more than ten separate legislative attempts to pass a comprehensive new gaming statute between the Fox and Peña Nieto administrations (roughly 2000–2018), none of which reached enactment. The most recent visible attempt was an initiative introduced in the Chamber of Deputies in October 2025 by deputy Ricardo Sóstenes Mejía Berdeja of the Labour Party (PT) parliamentary group, proposing to abrogate the 1947 law entirely and replace it with a new Ley Federal de Juegos con Apuestas y Sorteos, reportedly including a proposed National Institute of Games and Lotteries. As of mid-2026 it, like its predecessors, has not been enacted — Mexico’s gambling sector continues to run on a 1947 statute and its 2004 implementing regulation, the latter now heavily amended.

The 2023 decree on slot machines and its unresolved litigation

On 16 November 2023, the federal government published a decree in the Diario Oficial de la Federación amending and adding to the 2004 Reglamento, effective the following day. Rather than closing the “sorteos de números” fiction outright, it restricted it going forward. Reported provisions include:

No new permits for slot machines (máquinas tragamonedas) — defined broadly as any device through which a user gambles with a wager;
Card games, dice and roulette confirmed as unable to qualify as authorised sorteos, and therefore barred from new permits on the same basis as slot machines;
A maximum permit term of 15 years (down from a previous ceiling of 25 years), non-extendable, and permits tied to a single physical location — relocation requires a fresh permit;
Abolition of the separate “operator” figure, so only the permit holder itself may run an establishment; and
Tighter beneficial-ownership disclosure, requiring shareholder identification and sworn declarations of no convictions for property, tax or organised-crime offences.

Existing slot-machine permits were not revoked; they remain valid until they expire, capped at the new 15-year maximum, but cannot be renewed. Government officials and subsequent press coverage framed the change around preventing problem gambling (ludopatía) among minors, older people and other vulnerable groups, although legal commentary has noted the decree’s own text is largely silent on that rationale, expressing the changes mainly in administrative and permit-term terms.

The decree has been in litigation ever since. Multiple federal appellate courts (tribunales colegiados) reportedly granted amparo relief to individual operators, finding the restrictions unconstitutional as applied — largely on the theory that altering the terms of already-granted permits violated legal certainty. The lead case now before the Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación (SCJN) is Amparo en revisión 257/2025, brought by IGT-Mexicana de Juegos, which had obtained an initial gaming permit in 2014 for a ten-year term and secured a fifteen-year extension in 2023 shortly before the restrictions took effect. SCJN President and case rapporteur Minister Hugo Aguilar Ortiz circulated a draft opinion proposing to uphold the reforms as a constitutionally valid public-health measure. The Court was due to discuss that draft on 14 July 2026 but pulled the case from the agenda without public explanation, leaving the decree’s constitutional status — and the fate of roughly 444 casinos reported to have been operating under slot-machine permits as of November 2023 — formally unresolved as of this writing.

Online gambling: an ambiguous, largely offshore-served market

Neither the 1947 law nor the 2004 Reglamento contemplates the internet. In practice, DGJS has issued licences to a number of betting and casino brands (reporting names operators including bet365, 1XBET and Betano among those holding Mexican authorisation) by treating online operations as digital extensions of an existing physical-establishment permit, rather than through any dedicated online-gambling licence category. Nothing in Mexican law bars a player from accessing a foreign-licensed site directly, and industry estimates reported in the Mexican business press put Mexico’s online betting and casino market at roughly US$2.4–2.5 billion in 2025 with about 4 million active users — while suggesting that as much as half of that spending may flow to platforms with no Mexican authorisation at all, typically licensed instead in Malta, Gibraltar, Curaçao or the Isle of Man. In late 2025, Mexico’s Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) blocked a number of physical and online casinos as part of money-laundering investigations, underlining regulators’ stated concern that the sector’s legal gaps double as a financial-crime exposure.

Taxation, enforcement and the Sheinbaum reform push (2025–2026)

Fiscal policy has moved faster than gaming law itself. A decree published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on 7 November 2025 raised the federal Impuesto Especial sobre Producción y Servicios (IEPS, a special production-and-services tax) on games with betting and sorteos from 30% to 50%, effective 1 January 2026, and extended the levy explicitly to betting or sorteo activity conducted over the internet by foreign residents with no establishment in Mexico. Officials framed the increase partly as an anti-money-laundering measure, intended to push operators toward transparent, declared income, with projected additional federal revenue of more than 5 billion pesos in 2026.

Separately, in October 2025 President Claudia Sheinbaum announced that her government — coordinating the UIF, the Treasury (Hacienda) and Gobernación, with Secretary of Gobernación Rosa Icela Rodríguez leading the technical work — would pursue a broader update to the Ley Federal de Juegos y Sorteos itself, explicitly to bring digital casinos and betting platforms inside a modern regulatory perimeter and to close the gaps that allow undeclared and offshore operators to serve Mexican bettors. The government indicated casino operators would be consulted as part of that process. As of mid-2026 no bill arising from that initiative had been enacted.

Mexico’s gambling law in 2026

Taken together, the picture in 2026 is of a sector regulated almost entirely through administrative interpretation and decree rather than through a modern statute passed by Congress. The operative law is still the 1947 LFJS, which bans games of chance while permitting a short, dated list of exceptions; the operative machinery is still the 2004 Reglamento, which stretched the “sorteos” exception to cover slot machines and casino floors; the most consequential recent change is a 2023 executive decree narrowing that stretch for future permits, whose constitutionality the Supreme Court has yet to resolve; and the fastest-moving front is taxation, where a near-doubled IEPS rate reaching offshore operators took effect on 1 January 2026 well ahead of any comprehensive new gaming law. A genuinely new Ley Federal de Juegos — the kind repeatedly proposed since the Fox administration and promised again by Sheinbaum in October 2025 — had not been enacted at the time of writing.

Key dates

Year	Event
1770 (7 Aug)	Carlos III authorises the Real Lotería General de la Nueva España, colonial forerunner of Mexico’s national lottery
1771 (13 May)	First lottery draw held in Mexico City
1895	Hipódromo de Indianilla opens in Mexico City, part of the Porfiriato-era racing and betting boom
1911	Fall of the Porfiriato ends the era’s openly tolerated casino culture
1915	National lottery draws suspended during the Revolution
1916	Hipódromo Agua Caliente / Tijuana Jockey Club founded — root of the modern Grupo Caliente
1920	National lottery draws restored
1928	Agua Caliente casino and resort opens near Tijuana
1935	Widely reported (not independently verified here) presidential closure of Mexico’s casinos under Lázaro Cárdenas, including Agua Caliente
1947 (31 Dec)	Ley Federal de Juegos y Sorteos published in the DOF; still the governing federal statute
1978 (24 Feb)	Pronósticos Deportivos para la Asistencia Pública created by decree
1985 (14 Jan)	Ley Orgánica de la Lotería Nacional para la Asistencia Pública published
2004 (17 Sep)	Reglamento de la Ley Federal de Juegos y Sorteos published, enabling “salas de sorteos de números” and remote betting centres
2020 (14 Jan)	Lotería Nacional merged into Pronósticos para la Asistencia Pública
2023 (16–17 Nov)	Decree amends the 2004 Reglamento: no new slot-machine permits, 15-year permit cap, operator figure abolished
2025 (Oct)	President Claudia Sheinbaum announces plans to modernise the Ley Federal de Juegos y Sorteos for digital betting
2025 (7 Nov)	Decree raises IEPS on betting/gaming from 30% to 50%, effective 1 Jan 2026, reaching offshore online operators
2026 (14 Jul)	SCJN postpones ruling on the constitutionality of the 2023 slot-machine decree (Amparo en revisión 257/2025)

Sources

Ley Federal de Juegos y Sorteos, texto vigente (DOF 31 December 1947), via Jalisco state transparency portal: https://transparencia.info.jalisco.gob.mx/sites/default/files/Ley%20Federal%20de%20Juegos%20y%20Sorteos.pdf — primary source for the full text of Articles 1–17 and transitory provisions, including the exact list of permitted games and the permit/penalty regime.
Diario Oficial de la Federación search results and Cámara de Diputados legislative index (accessed via search, direct fetch blocked): confirms the 1947 publication date, the 2004 Reglamento’s 17 September publication date, and the 16 November 2023 decree.
Greenberg Traurig LLP, “Reformas y adiciones… al Reglamento de la Ley Federal de Juegos y Sorteos”: https://www.gtlaw.com/en/insights/2023/11/reformas-y-adiciones-de-diversas-disposiciones-al-reglamento-de-la-ley-federal-de-juegos-y-sorteos — supports the detailed content of the November 2023 decree (permit terms, prohibited games, ownership disclosure).
Von Wobeser y Sierra, “Reforma en materia de juegos y sorteos”: http://www.vonwobeser.com/index.php/publicacion?p_id=1865 — corroborates the 2023 decree’s effective date, grandfather clause and stated public-health rationale.
Vanguardia, “Inicia discusión en la SCJN para poner un freno a las máquinas tragamonedas en casinos”: https://vanguardia.com.mx/noticias/inicia-discusion-en-la-scjn-para-poner-un-freno-a-las-maquinas-tragamonedas-en-casinos-HH22162324 — supports the SCJN case details, IGT’s role, and Minister Hugo Aguilar’s draft opinion.
Diario de Juárez (diario.mx), “Posponen freno a tragamonedas en casinos”: https://diario.mx/nacional/2026/jul/14/posponen-freno-a-tragamonedas-en-casinos-1127780.html — supports the 14 July 2026 postponement of the SCJN vote and case number.
Infobae, “Del primer sorteo en 1771 a la rifa de casas de narcos”: https://www.infobae.com/america/mexico/2021/06/16/del-primer-sorteo-en-1771-a-la-rifa-de-casas-de-narcos-como-ha-cambiado-la-loteria-nacional/ — supports the founding and first-draw dates of the national lottery and its Revolution-era suspension/restoration.
Leyco.org, Ley Orgánica de la Lotería Nacional para la Asistencia Pública: https://leyco.org/mex/fed/155.html — supports the 14 January 1985 publication date and 2020 repeal/merger.
Expansión, “¿Qué tan grande es el mercado de casinos en línea en México y quién lo regula?”: https://expansion.mx/tecnologia/2025/12/02/mercado-de-casinos-en-linea-mexico-quien-lo-regula — supports online market size estimates, DGJS’s regulatory role, the offshore-operator share estimate, and the UIF casino blocks.
El Imparcial, “¿Cómo será la regulación del juego en México en 2026?”: https://www.elimparcial.com/dinero/2025/12/23/como-sera-la-regulacion-del-juego-en-mexico-en-2026/ — supports the IEPS increase to 50% and related digital-operator formalisation requirements for 2026.
Yogonet Latinoamérica, “El Senado aprobó el aumento de impuestos a los juegos de azar online del 30% al 50%”: https://www.yogonet.com/latinoamerica/noticias/2025/10/31/106477-mexico-el-senado-aprobo-el-aumento-de-impuestos-a-los-juegos-de-azar-online-del-30-al-50- — supports the IEPS legislative process and rate change.
El Universal, “Así es el funcionamiento de los casinos en México”: https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion/asi-es-el-funcionamiento-de-los-casinos-en-mexico-la-regulacion-detras-del-juego/ — supports the account of the 1930s casino prohibition and DGJS’s role in disputes.