Mexico Has 5,336 Betting Permits. No One Knows Which Ones Still Operate.

Mexico has 5,336 betting permits. No one knows which ones still operate.

A PRI legislator just submitted a resolution asking Segob to publish the registry. Open data format. By state. Operating, suspended, or closed in the last five years. The current list is, in his own description, "diffuse and fragmented." The Federal Gaming and Sweepstakes Law is from 1947 and never contemplated an online wager.

This is a regulator that cannot account for its own licensees. Not "will not" — cannot. The country's Financial Intelligence Unit filed 351,236 vulnerability notices linked to gambling between January and September of last year. A 14.6% jump year-over-year. OFAC sanctioned 27 entities last November and named ten Mexican betting houses where two million dollars moved through cash-chip cycles between 2017 and 2024. The FATF mutual evaluation is coming.

Operators reading this from Lagos, Nairobi or Cape Town should not feel comfortable. The same opacity gap exists wherever a regulator was set up to license but not to publish. Nigeria's state-level fragmentation after the federal authority lapsed. South Africa's provincial licensing layer. Kenya in transition. Tanzania's foreign-operator investment thresholds buried inside Gaming Board PDFs that change without versioning.

A FATF evaluator does not visit to admire the casinos. They ask one question. Show me the list of licensed entities and the AML programme attached to each. If the regulator cannot do that in machine-readable form within an hour, the country goes onto the grey list within twelve months. Then the operators discover that licensing was the easy part. The grey list is when the correspondent banks call.

Mexico is, in this sense, the warning the rest of the continent should be reading carefully. Not because the cases are alike. Because the architecture is.