Vapes, E-Cigarettes and Nicotine Pouches in Guatemala: Where the Law Actually Reaches (2026)

In short: Guatemala has no general law against vaping. The smoke-free statute, Decreto 74-2008, defines smoking as burning or lighting a product that contains tobacco — an e-cigarette does neither, and the decree never says the words “electronic”, “vape” or “nicotine”. The only enacted vape rule is Acuerdo Ministerial 96-2025, which bans use of electronic nicotine delivery systems inside Ministry of Health premises. Nicotine pouches are named by no Guatemalan instrument at all. A bill has been pending in Congress since January 2025 and has not been voted. This page reports what the instruments say; it is not legal advice, and statutory silence is not permission.

Our customs guide answers the arrival question in a paragraph: a personal vape is not banned at the border. This page is about everything that happens after the border — the law that governs where people may smoke, whether it reaches a device that does not burn, and what happens to a product category that no Guatemalan instrument has yet written down.

The short version is that Guatemala regulates tobacco combustion thoroughly and nicotine delivery barely at all. That gap is the whole story, and most pages written about this subject get it wrong in one of two directions — either announcing a ban that was never enacted, or reading the absence of a ban as an authorisation.

The four instruments that actually exist

Decreto 74-2008: the interesting silence

This is the law people mean when they say Guatemala is “smoke-free”. It was issued by Congress on 24 November 2008 and published in the Diario de Centro America on 22 December 2008, entering force 60 days after publication (Art. 9).

Its Article 3 prohibits “fumar o mantener encendidos cualquier tipo de productos de tabaco” in three places:

• a. any space in an enclosed public place
• b. any space in a workplace
• c. any means of public, collective or community transport

The question is whether an e-cigarette is caught by that. The answer turns entirely on Article 2(12), which defines the verb:

"Fumar: Significa inhalar y exhalar, quemar o encender cualquier tipo de puro, cigarro, cigarrillo o pipa o cualquier producto, que de cualquier forma contenga tabaco."

Two elements have to be present: burning or lighting, and a product that in any form contains tobacco. A conventional e-cigarette heats a liquid without combustion, and the liquid is not tobacco. Article 3’s own object is likewise “productos de tabaco” — tobacco products.

We searched the full official text of the decree for the terms electrónico, vape, vapor, vapea, nicotina, dispositivo and calentado. All returned zero occurrences. The law does not address these devices, and it was written sixteen years before the ministry felt the need to issue a separate agreement about them — which is itself evidence that the ministry did not consider the 2008 statute to already cover them.

What follows from this, precisely: no instrument we found either authorises or prohibits vaping in a Guatemalan restaurant, bar, office or bus. The statute that governs smoking in those places is drafted around combustion and tobacco. We are not telling you that vaping there is permitted — we are telling you which instrument would have to say so, and reporting that it does not.

What Decreto 74-2008 does do, in full

Worth knowing, because it does bind anyone carrying conventional cigarettes:

The fines are indexed, not fixed

Article 6 does not state amounts in quetzales. It states them in daily minimum wages for agricultural activities, which means the figure moves every year:

For 2026 the agricultural minimum wage is Q124.64 per day in CE1 (the department of Guatemala) and Q119.21 per day in CE2 (everywhere else), under Acuerdo Gubernativo 256-2025, in force from 1 January 2026. Converting the law’s units at those rates gives a smoker’s fine of Q1,246.40 in CE1 and Q1,192.10 in CE2, and an establishment fine of Q12,464.00 / Q11,921.00. Those quetzal figures are our arithmetic on the published wage, not amounts printed in either instrument. The procedure for applying sanctions follows Chapter Three of the Health Code, Decreto 90-97.

Acuerdo Ministerial 96-2025: the one enacted vape rule

Signed in Guatemala on 4 April 2025 by the Minister of Public Health and Social Assistance, Dr. Joaquin Barnoya Perez. Its operative provision is one sentence:

"Articulo 1. Se prohibe utilizar sistemas electronicos de administracion de nicotina, tambien llamados cigarros electronicos o vaporizadores, en todas las instalaciones que ocupa el Ministerio de Salud Publica y Asistencia Social, incluyendo toda la red de establecimientos de salud y la red nacional de hospitales para empleados, contratistas y usuarios."

Three details that matter and are usually reported loosely:

1. It covers every facility MSPAS occupies — not only hospitals and clinics, but administrative premises too, and it binds employees, contractors and users alike.
2. The operative article names only electronic systems. Press coverage of the agreement, including the ministry’s own, also referred to heated tobacco. The considerando speaks broadly of novel and emerging products containing tobacco or nicotine, but Article 1 itself names only “sistemas electronicos de administracion de nicotina… cigarros electronicos o vaporizadores.”
3. There is no fine. Article 2 makes each Director, Jefe, Coordinador or person in charge responsible for their staff’s compliance and for pursuing the corresponding responsibilities in case of breach. It is an internal administrative measure, enforced administratively — not a criminal or monetary penalty on the public. Article 3 brought it into force immediately.

Its legal basis is Article 194 lit. a), f) and i) of the Constitution, Article 27 lit. a), f) and m) of Decreto 114-97 (Ley del Organismo Ejecutivo), and Articles 5 and 8 of Acuerdo Gubernativo 59-2023.

Nicotine pouches: a product no instrument names

This is the cleanest example of a gap on the whole subject. We checked every instrument above for pouches — Zyn and its category — and found nothing:

No published Guatemalan instrument found as of 2026-08-11 either authorises or prohibits nicotine pouches, and none defines them as a product category. That is the answer. We are not inferring from that silence that pouches are lawful to sell, import in quantity, or use anywhere in particular — only that the instruments that would say so do not mention them.

Note also that the tobacco-free versions occupy an odd position: Decreto 48-92, the narcotics law, states in Article 2(a) that “a las bebidas alcoholicas y el tabaco, no les son aplicables las disposiciones de esta ley” — alcohol and tobacco are expressly outside the drug statute. Note what that carve-out names, though: tobacco, not nicotine. And Article 2(b) of the same law contains no list of controlled substances at all — it routes their identification outward, to the international conventions binding on Guatemala and to the Health Code. We did not establish how a tobacco-free oral nicotine product sits under that referral, and we are not asserting that it sits outside it. What we did establish is narrower: the tobacco law is drafted around burning tobacco, and no instrument we found names a nicotine pouch.

The 500-gram allowance, and what it is written for

SAT’s traveler guidance applies RECAUCA Article 578 lit. j), which reads in full:

“Quinientos gramos de tabaco elaborado en cualquier presentacion, cinco litros de vino, aguardiente o licor, por cada viajero mayor de edad y hasta dos kilogramos de golosinas.”

So: 500 g of manufactured tobacco, by weight, in any presentation, per adult traveler. It is a weight allowance, not a stick count — a point our customs guide covers for cigarettes generally.

Applying it to the newer categories:

• Cigarettes and cigars — manufactured tobacco. Squarely within the 500 g.
• Heated-tobacco sticks — contain tobacco. They fall within those words on their face and would sensibly be weighed against the same allowance.
• E-liquid — not tobacco. The provision does not address it.
• Tobacco-free nicotine pouches — not tobacco. The provision does not address them.

How SAT treats a specific product at the counter is an administrative classification decision, and we found no published SAT guidance applying Art. 578 to e-liquid or pouches. If you want the general framework for what is restricted at the border, that lives in our prohibited and restricted imports guide.

Getting the device there: the aviation rules are the strict ones

Ironically, the rules that constrain a traveler most are not Guatemalan at all — they are the aviation hazmat rules, and they are unambiguous where Guatemalan law is silent. Under 49 CFR 175.10(a)(19):

TSA’s own item page states plainly that electronic smoking devices are allowed only in carry-on baggage, repeats the accidental-activation requirement and the 100 Wh / 2 g battery limits, and notes that airlines may impose their own limits on how many devices a passenger may carry.

The trap worth planning around: the device must be in the cabin, but e-liquid is screened as a liquid. TSA’s liquids rule caps carry-on containers at 3.4 oz / 100 ml, in a single quart-sized bag, and directs anything larger to checked baggage. A large bottle of liquid and the device it feeds therefore travel in different parts of the aircraft.

Edge cases and honest gaps

Couriers are not customs. Shipping restrictions imposed by a courier are contractual terms in that company’s service guide, and they operate independently of Guatemalan customs law — a courier may refuse a shipment the law would have allowed. We attempted to retrieve FedEx’s prohibited-items page on 2026-08-11 and received a system error page rather than the policy, so we are not restating any specific courier’s current rule here. That is a source we could not read, not a fact we established to be unpublished. Check the service guide of the courier you intend to use, on the day you ship.

Can you buy replacement pods here? We found no official or authoritative published source on the retail availability of specific vape hardware, pods or e-liquid in Guatemala — no sanitary-registration regime naming these products, and no government registry of authorised sellers. Retail availability is a commercial fact, not a published one, and we will not guess at it. What we can say is what we established above: no import prohibition was found, and no instrument creates a registration requirement for the category.

Private rules still apply. Statutory silence does not bind a landlord, a hotel, an employer, a restaurant or an airline, each of which may set its own conditions.

The pending bill can move. Iniciativa 6498 was presented on 29 January 2025 and was reported as stalled in the health commission as of 10 February 2026. Its described contents — prohibition of sale to minors, advertising restrictions, an age-verification notice at points of sale, fines expressed in non-agricultural minimum wages, and MSPAS as enforcement authority — are the contents of a proposal, not of law. Nothing in this page should be read as reporting an enacted sales restriction. Verify the current status before relying on any of it.

Sources

This page reports the content of published instruments as retrieved on 2026-08-11. It is not legal advice, and it does not tell you what you may do — legislative and administrative status can change after the retrieval date. Where an instrument is silent we have said so rather than inferred a rule in either direction. En espanol: Vapeadores, cigarros electronicos y bolsitas de nicotina en Guatemala.