Three speeds in Latin America, and the case for earmarking gambling revenue

Latin America is often discussed as a single emerging gambling market. It is not, and Brazil is a fourth case again. Three of its jurisdictions are currently at three completely different stages, and comparing them isolates something useful about why some regimes survive and others stall.

Peru: regulated, and spending the proceeds visibly

Peru's online framework launched in February 2024 under Law No. 31557, with MINCETUR licensing both online sports betting and casino gaming. By mid-2025, 60 platforms and 280 suppliers had been approved. Licensed operators pay 12% of gross gaming revenue plus a 1% levy per wager.

The more interesting provision is where the money goes. Peru earmarks its gambling tax revenue: 40% to the public treasury, 40% to tourism development, and 20% to mental health programmes.

Peru: GGR tax plus per-wager levy

12% + 1%Peru: GGR tax plus per-wager levy

Treasury / tourism / mental health split

40 / 40 / 20Treasury / tourism / mental health split

Colombia: GGR rate under Coljuegos

~15%Colombia: GGR rate under Coljuegos

Why earmarking is a durability mechanism

Gambling regimes face a recurring political problem. The harms are visible, personal and attributable: a named constituent with a gambling problem. The benefits are diffuse and abstract: a line in a national budget that funds nothing anyone can point to. That asymmetry is why regimes come under pressure even when they are working, and why tax rises are so often the political response of first resort.

Hypothecation converts an abstract revenue line into a defensible public good. It does not make the harms smaller: it makes the trade-off legible to the people asked to accept it.

Directing a fifth of the take to mental health programmes is not merely presentational. It creates a named institutional beneficiary of a functioning licensed market: one with its own reason to care about channelling, because unlicensed play funds nothing. That is a materially stronger political position than a regime defended only by its operators.

Colombia: the boring case, which is the point

Colombia has been regulated since 2016, supervised by Coljuegos, with online activity built into the national gambling framework through Law No. 1753 of 2015 and subsequent regulation. Operators require local authorisation before offering online products, and the rate has stayed regionally competitive at roughly 15% of gross gaming revenue. A decade of continuity, no dramatic reversals, and a functioning licensed market, which is what success looks like and why it is rarely written about.

Chile: the cost of the gap

Chile has had a bill to regulate online gambling pending in the Senate since 2022. In the meantime, demand has not waited. The Supreme Court ordered telecommunications providers to block unauthorised gambling sites in 2026: a court supplying, imperfectly, what the legislature has not.

This is the standard cost of legislative delay. The market exists either way; the only question is whether it is supervised, taxed and subject to player protection obligations, or whether it is addressed through blocking orders that VPN adoption erodes within months. Four years of pending legislation is four years of an unregulated market establishing consumer habits that a future licensed market will have to win back.