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Mexico’s prohibitive 2023 decree essentially banning slot machines and online casino games should be overturned in court within the next few months, according to Mexican legal experts.
“We're going to go to the end. And I would say in six months, we will have definitive rules,” Carlos Portilla, founding partner of law firm Portilla, Ruy-Diaz y Aguilar, told Vixio GamblingCompliance in an interview last week.
The decree, signed in November 2023, effectively prevents any existing licences for slot machines and other casino-style games from being granted or renewed.
In many cases operators have years left to run on their permits, but if left unchallenged the decree would eventually destroy most of the industry.
So far, district judges in Mexico have granted injunctions to individual operators that protect them from its effects.
The decree itself, however, has yet to be definitively declared to be unconstitutional, or otherwise legal, in court.
Mexican gaming lawyers were quick to argue that the prohibitive regulatory decree was unconstitutional when it was signed last year, referencing the Mexican Supreme Court’s ruling in 2016 that found gaming machines offering drawings of numbers or symbols to be permissible under a 1947 federal gambling law.
Still, Portilla said that American and European-based gaming machine manufacturers are still facing issues with customs officials when it comes to importing their products into Mexico despite the court injunctions, “because they are putting requirements that are not in the law. So now we are still fighting for that”.
The first requirement being imposed on manufacturers, Portilla said, is to file a petition of importation with a letter from a casino stating that those machines are going to be installed in their establishments.
“That's something that the law does not require,” the lawyer told Vixio. “That means that the manufacturers need a permit like that of the casino.”
The second requirement is for manufacturers to withdraw their petitions for constitutional proceedings.
“Our recommendation,” said Portilla, “is don’t do that. Because what we really need is to have the final definitive definitions of the court stating that the decree is illegal and unconstitutional. So if you withdraw your demand or claims, they will not be resolved by the appeal courts, and we need that.”
“Nobody's going to comply with it,” he concluded.
Portilla said he believes that the decree was always meant as a distraction from the presidential elections that took place in June and which led to the election of Claudia Sheinbaum as Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) successor.
Sheinbaum will take office on October 1, and Portilla is hopeful that she will be more impartial when it comes to gaming than her predecessor and political mentor AMLO.
“He really didn’t like casinos, that’s for sure. Claudia Sheinbaum, she’s never promised anything that goes against casinos. My guess is they are going to be left in peace.
