Tobacco and Nicotine Compliance in South America 2026

On May 4, 2026, Argentina's Ministry of Health published Resolución 549/2026, ending a 15-year prohibition on electronic cigarettes and creating a full registration regime for vapes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches. Nineteen days later, on the other side of the continent, ANVISA and Brazil's Receita Federal launched Operação Rede de Fumaça, seizing more than 25,000 illegal e-cigarettes and 107,000 packs of smuggled cigarettes in a single nationwide sweep. Four months earlier, Mexico had gone the opposite direction from Argentina entirely: a January 16, 2026 constitutional amendment placed vaping devices in the same legal category as unauthorized synthetic drugs, banning their import, manufacture, distribution and sale outright.

Five major South American jurisdictions, and five genuinely different bets on how to handle nicotine products. Brazil and Mexico ban. Argentina just legalized and regulated. Colombia extended its antitabaco law to vapes but has not yet taxed them. Chile treats vaping as a tobacco product for every purpose except its tax bracket. For a manufacturer, importer or distributor with regional ambitions, this is not a single compliance question, it is five separate legal regimes moving on five separate timelines, some of them reversing course within the same calendar year.

Getting the jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction detail wrong here is not a paperwork problem. In Mexico, selling or distributing an unauthorized vaping device now carries penalties of up to 212,500 pesos and up to eight years in prison. In Brazil, e-cigarettes have been prohibited since Resolução RDC 46/2009 and remain a criminal health infraction under Law 6,437/1977. Compliance teams that treat South America as one market are the ones that get caught in the next enforcement sweep.

Which South American countries still ban e-cigarettes outright?

Brazil and Mexico both maintain absolute bans, but through different legal instruments and with different histories. Brazil's ANVISA Resolução RDC 855/2024, in force since April 23, 2024, prohibits the manufacture, importation, commercialization, distribution, storage, transportation and advertising of all electronic smoking devices, including ENDS, ENNDS, heated tobacco products and their accessories, parts and refills. It replaced the original 2009 ban and closed loopholes that had let informal retailers operate. In February 2026, ANVISA signed a five-year cooperation agreement with the Federal Prosecution Service (MPF) to share enforcement data and coordinate raids, and on June 23, 2026 the two agencies ran Operação Rede de Fumaça, hitting border crossings, logistics hubs, the postal service and large retailers in one coordinated action. Brazil's Receita Federal reported that in 2025 alone it seized 163.8 million reais worth of illegal e-cigarettes, its fifth largest seizure category by value that year.

Mexico's route was constitutional rather than administrative. After the Supreme Court struck down an earlier import ban as unconstitutional in a Philip Morris Mexico case, the government amended Articles 4 and 5 of the Constitution in 2025 to explicitly authorize prohibiting vaping products, then implemented that mandate through a Decree amending the General Health Law, published January 15, 2026 and effective the next day. The Decree bans commercial acquisition, production, manufacturing, packaging, transport, import, export, marketing, distribution, sale and supply of e-cigarettes and analogous devices, voids every previously granted authorization, and exempts only personal, non-commercial possession and consumption. Heated tobacco devices are explicitly carved out of the ban, a distinction manufacturers of that product category need to track closely.

Why did Argentina reverse 15 years of prohibition in May 2026?

Argentina's ANMAT had banned electronic nicotine delivery systems since Disposición 3226/2011, later extended to heated tobacco in 2023. That prohibition ended on May 4, 2026 through a coordinated package: Ministry of Health Resolución 549/2026, ANMAT Disposición 2543/2026 repealing the 2011 ban, and a customs decree adjusting import tariffs. The government's own justification cited a SEDRONAR 2025 survey finding that 35.5 percent of secondary school students had already used e-cigarettes despite fifteen years of prohibition, evidence that the ban had failed to prevent access while leaving the market entirely informal and unregulated.

The new framework creates the Registro de Productos de Tabaco y Nicotina (RPTN), a mandatory registration, traceability and control system under which vapes, e-liquids, heated tobacco sticks and nicotine pouches must be registered via the Trámites a Distancia platform before import or sale. Disposable e-cigarettes with pre-filled solutions are banned outright as the format considered most attractive to youth initiation. Permitted flavors are restricted to tobacco for vapes and heated tobacco, and tobacco or menthol for nicotine pouches. Advertising, promotion and sponsorship remain prohibited under Law 26,687. For any company that treated Argentina as a lost market for fifteen years, this is a full re-entry decision with a real compliance workload attached, not a formality.

How does Colombia regulate vaping without yet taxing it?

Colombia's Ley 2354 of 2024, published May 15, 2024, extends every control mechanism in Ley 1335 of 2009 (the country's antitabaco law) to Sistemas Electrónicos de Administración de Nicotina, Sistemas Similares Sin Nicotina, Productos de Tabaco Calentado and Productos de Nicotina Oral. That means packaging and labeling rules, advertising restrictions, and a ban on consumption in enclosed workplaces and public spaces like restaurants, malls, parks and bars, all apply to vapes exactly as they apply to cigarettes. Enforcement sits with the Superintendencia de Industria y Comercio (SIC), with fines ranging from 250 to 400 legal monthly minimum wages, a materially lower ceiling than the SIC's usual consumer-protection sanctions.

What Ley 2354 did not do is create a consumption tax. That gap is now the subject of an active legislative fight: Proyecto de Ley 136 of 2025, accumulated with Proyecto de Ley 290 of 2025, would amend Colombia's existing tobacco consumption tax framework (Ley 223 of 1995, Ley 1393 of 2010, Ley 1819 of 2016) to bring vapes and nicotine pouches inside it for the first time. The Finance Ministry's own numbers, filed with the bill, propose a 30 percent ad valorem tax on vapes against 10 percent for cigarettes, plus a specific tax of 2,000 pesos per milliliter of liquid, projected to raise 309,000 million pesos from vaping products alone in 2026. Any company pricing product for the Colombian market needs a live read on where that bill stands, not a snapshot from the year it was filed.

What does Chile's Ley 21.642 require from vape retailers and manufacturers?

Chile's Ley 21.642, in force since May 20, 2025, amended the existing tobacco control statute (Ley 19.419) to bring cigarrillos electrónicos, with or without nicotine, under the same regulatory umbrella as combustible tobacco. The law bans sale to anyone under 18, restricts sales within 100 meters of schools and health centers, mandates health warnings on devices, accessories and vaping liquids for the first time, prohibits advertising that suggests health benefits, and extends the existing ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces, transport and beaches to vaping.

Where Chile has not yet equalized treatment is tax. Vapes currently carry only the standard 19 percent VAT, while cigarettes face a 30 percent ad valorem tax plus a specific per-unit levy that pushes the effective rate to roughly 52.6 percent of the retail price. The Ministries of Finance and Health are jointly drafting a bill to apply a comparable specific tax to vaping products, a proposal that surfaced again during 2026 tax reform discussions in the Senate Finance Committee. Until that bill passes, Chile is the region's clearest example of a product regulated like tobacco for public health purposes but taxed like an ordinary consumer good.

What does this patchwork mean for a compliance or market access strategy?

A single regional playbook does not survive contact with this table. A product legal to import and register in Buenos Aires is a criminal offense to distribute in Mexico City. A tax assumption that holds in Santiago changes the moment Chile's equalization bill passes committee. Tracking five legislatures, five health ministries and five customs authorities by hand, in two languages, is exactly the workload that turns a compliance team from proactive to reactive.

This is the gap Obsidian's per-jurisdiction monitoring is built to close: tier-0 sources from ANVISA, COFEPRIS, ANMAT, the Colombian Congress and the Chilean Senate feeding into one tracked view, with alerts the moment a resolution, decree or tax bill actually moves rather than when a news summary catches up to it. For teams running scenario planning across all five markets at once, Obsidian's AI companion can turn a question like "which of these five countries taxes vaping liquid by volume" into a sourced answer in seconds, and technical and legal teams already wiring monitoring into internal tools can pull the same underlying data through the MCP integration.

What should a compliance team do next?

Start by mapping which of the five regimes actually applies to your product category today, since heated tobacco, disposable vapes, nicotine pouches and liquids are treated differently even within a single country's law, as Mexico's carve-out and Argentina's disposable ban both show. Then set a review cadence tied to the open questions in the table above, because Colombia's tax bill and Chile's equalization proposal are both live legislative processes that could change pricing and margin calculations within a single fiscal year. Compliance and market access teams that treat South America as five distinct, actively evolving regimes, not one region, are the ones positioned to move first when the next resolution publishes. Explore Obsidian's plans to see how continuous, sourced monitoring across all five jurisdictions fits your team's workflow.