Mexico's illegal gambling in 2026: The challenge of regulating slot machines controlled by organised crime
In raids carried out during the first week of June across the states of Colima, Aguascalientes and Guanajuato, Mexican authorities seized and destroyed hundreds of illegal slot machines, exposing the scale of a business that organised crime has built from inside corner shops.
The slot machine war: three states, one week, the same problem
There is a scene that repeats itself in Mexico with the regularity of sunrise: uniformed officers enter a convenience store, load the slot machines onto a pickup truck and drive away. The following day, or the following week, new ones, shipped from China through the port of Lázaro Cárdenas, are back in place. This week, that scene played out, in different settings but with identical logic, across Colima, Aguascalientes and Guanajuato. On 5 June, the State Coordination Board for Peace and Security in Colima, a state on the country’s western coast, announced the destruction of 279 slot machines, linked to 77 investigation files held by the Attorney General of the Republic.
The same day, in Aguascalientes, the commander of the 14th Military Zone, Álvaro Javier Juárez Vázquez, put forward a figure that gives pause: according to news media outlet El Clarinete, these devices generate approximately 600 million Mexican pesos per week for criminal groups nationwide. It is a military estimate rather than an audited study, but no authority has contradicted it, and several state governors have repeated it in various forums throughout the year. Then, on 9 June, according to Quadratín Bajío news, the State Attorney General’s Office seized 30 slot machines during operations at various locations across Guanajuato as part of efforts to combat unlawful gambling.
A 1947 Law regulating a 21st-century business
To understand why the raids appear insufficient, one must look at the legislation that underpins them. The General Directorate of Games, under the Secretariat of the Interior (SEGOB), is Mexico’s gambling regulator, and its legal foundation is the Federal Law on Games and Draws, enacted in 1947, nearly 80 years ago. That law stipulates that any betting activity requires authorisation from the Secretariat of the Interior, authorisation that most of these machines lack.
According to figures published in April by Diario de Yucatán and El Universal, 2,147 unauthorised machines were seized between January 2024 and March 2026:
- 309 in 2024;
- 1,629 in 2025;
- 209 more in the first three months of 2026.
This represents a 427 per cent year-on-year increase. The figures cannot answer the question of whether the raids are working or whether the machines are simply multiplying faster than they can be removed.
The World Cup is the reason for acting now
Compounding all of this is a timely warning issued ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) cautioned about a rise in illegal betting linked to the 2026 FIFA World Cup, noting that organised crime groups are driving such activity, and trained authorities in Mexico, Canada and the United States in the use of tools to tackle these offences.
Reading between the seizures
Mexico has demonstrated operational capacity this week, as shown by the actions taken in Colima, Aguascalientes and Guanajuato. Three states acted in coordination, reflecting a degree of joined-up working between federal, state and military forces that did not exist with this consistency just a few years ago. Mexico has the market, the operational will and the World Cup as a window of opportunity. Whether it also has the legislative will to bring its regulatory framework into the present day remains to be seen.
This article was first published on the Spanish SiGMA News page on 10 June 2026.
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