Do Mexico and Argentina DNC Rules Cover SMS Too?
DNC LATAM · Compliance guides
Yes. Mexico’s REPEP registry and Argentina’s Registro Nacional No Llame both cover marketing and advertising text messages, not just phone calls — a number registered on either list is off-limits for promotional SMS the same way it’s off-limits for a live call or an autodialer. Teams that scrub their calling lists but leave their SMS lists unchecked are treating a message channel as if it sits outside a rule that already names it.
Why this gets missed
Most compliance conversations start with “calling list” and stay there, because voice is where the audit trail and the per-call exposure usually get built first. SMS gets added later, often by a different team — marketing automation or a CPaaS integration rather than the outbound dialer — and the assumption that follows is that a text message is a lighter-touch channel that the Do Not Call rules weren’t really written for. Neither registry supports that assumption. Both were written to cover “marketing contact” as a category, not “phone calls” as a narrower one, and text messages fall inside that category by design, not by extension.
What Mexico’s REPEP actually covers
REPEP, the Registro Público para Evitar Publicidad run by PROFECO, applies to marketing calls and messages across regulated commercial sectors, and to the advertising use of consumer contact data — see the Mexico Do Not Call list guide for the full registry rules. A REPEP-registered number is registered against advertising contact generally. A promotional SMS sent to that number carries the same exposure as a call would: Mexico can sanction a company for each call or message reaching a registered number, not just for calls. If your outbound stack scrubs the dialer’s list against the current 15-day REPEP release but your SMS platform pulls from an unscrubbed CRM export, the SMS side is running an un-scrubbed campaign against the same registry your voice team already checks.
What Argentina’s No Llame actually covers
Argentina’s Registro Nacional No Llame, administered by AAIP under Law 26.951, is explicit that the rules cover messages and automated calls as well as live agents — see the Argentina Do Not Call list guide for the registry’s full scope. Any company that advertises, offers, sells or gifts goods or services by phone to an Argentine number needs to check the registry first, and “by phone” here includes SMS delivered to that number. A campaign that texts a promotional offer to an Argentine mobile number is the same kind of contact the registry was built to let consumers opt out of, whether the message arrives as a call or as text.
What’s actually exempt: OTPs and transactional messages
The scope isn’t unlimited. One-time passwords, login codes, delivery notifications, appointment reminders and other transactional messages aren’t the advertising or marketing contact either registry is built around — a bank sending a fraud alert or a two-factor code isn’t making the kind of contact REPEP or No Llame regulates. The line is the purpose of the message, not the channel: a transactional SMS stays outside scope regardless of registry status, while a promotional SMS to the same number does not. Teams sometimes try to extend that OTP exemption to promotional traffic by reasoning that “it’s just a text, not a call” — that reasoning doesn’t hold under either registry’s own language, which covers messages by name.
What this means for a blended voice and SMS campaign
For a US-based outbound operation running blended campaigns — a call sequence backed by SMS reminders, or an SMS-first sequence with a voice follow-up — the practical takeaway is that both channels need to clear the same registry check before either one sends. That means:
- The same phone number list gets scrubbed once, before it’s split between a dialer and a messaging platform, rather than scrubbing the dialer’s copy and assuming the messaging copy inherited the same result.
- A number added mid-campaign gets checked before either channel touches it — a lead that enters through a web form and gets an immediate SMS follow-up needs the same pre-send check a cold-call would get.
- The screening record covers both channels’ campaigns, not just the voice campaign, since an auditor reviewing a complaint about a text message will ask for the same kind of dated evidence covered in how DNC scrubbing works.
This is the same discipline covered in our call center compliance guide applied to a channel that doesn’t always sit under the same team as the dialer. If your SMS platform and your voice dialer pull from different systems, that’s the same propagation gap that shows up between a CRM and a dialer on the voice side — just one hop further out, into a channel that’s easy to treat as somebody else’s compliance problem until a complaint names it.
The practical fix
Standing up a separate scrub for SMS lists means solving the same registry-access problem twice — REPEP’s zone-by-zone Mexican data and No Llame’s authorized-user Argentine access — for a channel that most teams didn’t budget compliance overhead for in the first place. DNC LATAM checks a phone number against the same current REPEP or No Llame release regardless of which channel is about to contact it, so a marketing platform sending SMS and a dialer placing calls can both run the same check against the same country’s registry before either one sends, with one dated screening record either can point to if a complaint comes in. Country field in, phone numbers in, prohibited numbers out — the API doesn’t care whether the caller is about to dial or about to text.