South America
Venezuelan police arrest 33 men at gay sauna
Raid took place in Valencia in Carabobo state on Sunday

Police in Venezuela’s Carabobo state on Sunday raided a gay sauna and arrested 33 people.
A Venezuelan activist told the Washington Blade the arrests in Valencia, which is the country’s third largest city, took place “without a search warrant, without due process” and violated “the fundamental rights of 33 Venezuelan adults who were in full use of their mental and physical faculties.”
“[They were subjected to] degrading treatment,” said the activist. “[The police] deprived them of their liberty and subjected them to public ridicule.”
One local media report indicates an “orgy” was taking place during a “sex party” at the sauna when the raid took place.Ā
The report indicates one of the participants who police arrested lives with HIV. It also said party organizers planned to sell videos of the men having sex they recorded.
The activist with whom the Blade spoke said a judge on Wednesday released 30 of the 33 men who were arrested and ordered them to report to authorities every 30 days until they go to trial. The activist noted the sauna’s owner and two masseurs will remain in custody until they are able to pay bail.
Discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation, gender identity and HIV is commonplace in Venezuela, a South American country that remains in the midst of an ongoing political and economic crisis.
Members of Venezuelaās General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence in January 2021 raided the offices of Azul Positivo, an HIV/AIDS service organizationĀ and arrested the group’s president and five other staff members. Police on Feb. 15, 2019, raided the offices of Fundación Mavid, another HIV/AIDS service organization in Valencia, and arrested three staffers after they confiscated donated infant formula and medications for people with HIV/AIDS.
Caribe Afirmativo and Fundación de Atención Inclusiva, Social y Humana (FUVADIS) are among the advocacy groups in neighboring Colombia that continue to work with LGBTQ and intersex Venezuelans who have fled their country in recent years.
“Persecution against LGBTIQ+ people in Venezuela is increasing,” said the Venezuelan Education-Action Program on Human Rights (PROVEA), a Venezuelan human rights organization, in a tweet.
“We reiterate the need for due process, the right to private counsel and that every person knows the reasons for their detention,” added PROVEA. “To be homosexual is not a crime.”
Colombia
Claudia López running for president of Colombia
Former BogotƔ mayor married to Sen. AngƩlica Lozano

Former BogotÔ Mayor Claudia López has announced she is running for president of Colombia.
“We begin today and we will win in a year,” she said in a social media post on June 3.
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López, 55, was a student protest movement leader, journalist, and political scientist before she entered politics. López returned to Colombia in 2013 after she earned her PhD in political science at Columbia University.
López in a speech she gave last December after the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute honored her at its annual International LGBTQ Leaders Conference in D.C. noted Juan Francisco āKikoā Gomez, a former governor of La GuajĆra, a department in northern Colombia, threatened to assassinate her because she wrote about his ties to criminal gangs.
A BogotÔ judge in 2017 convicted Gómez of ordering members of a paramilitary group to kill former Barrancas Mayor Yandra Brito, her husband, and bodyguard and sentenced him to 55 years in prison.
López in 2014 returned to Colombia, and ran for the countryās Senate as a member of the center-left Green Alliance party after she recovered from breast cancer. López won after a 10-week campaign that cost $80,000.
López in 2018 was her partyās candidate to succeed then-President Juan Manuel Santos when he left office. López in 2019 became the first woman and first lesbian elected mayor of BogotĆ”, the Colombian capital and the countryās largest city.
López took office on Jan. 1, 2020, less than a month after she married her wife, Colombian Sen. AngĆ©lica Lozano. (López was not out when she was elected to the Senate.) López’s mayorship ended on Dec. 31, 2023. She was a 2024 Harvard University Advance Leadership Initiative fellow.
The first-round of Colombia’s presidential election will take place on May 31, 2026.
The country’s 1991 constitution prevents current President Gustavo Petro from seeking re-election.
López declared her candidacy four days before a gunman shot Sen. Miguel Uribe, a member of the opposition Democratic Center party who is seen as a probable presidential candidate, in the head during a rally in BogotĆ”’s Fontibón neighborhood.
She quickly condemned the shooting. López during an interview with the Washington Blade after the Victory Institute honored her called for an end to polarization in Colombia.
āWe need to listen to each other again, we need to have a coffee with each other again, we need to touch each otherās skin,ā she said.
López would be Colombia’s first female president if she wins. López would also become the third openly lesbian woman elected head of government ā Jóhanna Sigurưardóttir was Iceland’s prime minister from 2009-2013 and Ana BrnabiÄ was Serbia’s prime minister from 2017-2024.
Chile
Gay pharmacistās murder sparks outrage in Chile
Francisco Albornozās body found in remote ravine on June 4

The latest revelations about the tragic death of Francisco Albornoz, a 21-year-old gay pharmacist whose body was found on June 4 in a remote ravine in the OāHiggins region 12 days after he disappeared, has left Chileās LGBTQ community shocked.
The crime, which was initially surrounded by uncertainty and contradictory theories, has taken a darker and more shocking turn after prosecutors charged Christian GonzĆ”lez, an Ecuadorian doctor, and JosĆ© Miguel Baeza, a Chilean chef, in connection with Albornozās murder. GonzĆ”lez and Baeza are in custody while authorities continue to investigate the case.
The Chilean Public Prosecutor’s Office has pointed to a premeditated ācriminal planā to murder Albornoz.
Rossana Folli, the prosecutor who is in charge of the case, says Albornoz died as a a result of traumatic encephalopathy after receiving multiple blows to the head inside an apartment in ĆuƱoa, which is just outside of Santiago, the Chilean capital, early on May 24. The Prosecutorās Office has categorically ruled out that Albornoz died of a drug overdose, as initial reports suggested.
“The fact that motivates and leads to the unfortunate death of Francisco is part of a criminal plan of the two defendants, aimed at ensuring his death and guaranteeing total impunity,” Folli told the court. āThe seriousness of the facts led the judge to decree preventive detention for both defendants on the grounds that their freedom represents a danger to public safety.ā
Prosecutors during a June 7 hearing that lasted almost eight hours presented conservations from the suspectsā cell phones that they say showed they planned the murder in advance.Ā
“Here we already have one (for Albornoz.) If you bring chloroform, drugs, marijuana, etc.,” read one of the messages.
Security cameras captured the three men entering the apartment where the murder took place together.Ā
Hours later, one of the suspects left with a suitcase and a shopping cart to transport Albornozās body, which had been wrapped in a sleeping bag. The route they followed to dispose of the body included a stop to buy drinks, potato chips, gloves, and a rope with which they finally descended a ravine to hide it.
Advocacy groups demand authorities investigate murder as hate crime
Although the Public Prosecutor’s Office has not yet officially classified the murder as a hate crime, LGBTQ organizations are already demanding authorities investigate this angle. Human rights groups have raised concerns over patterns of violence that affect queer people in Chile.
The Zamudio Law and other anti-discrimination laws exist. Activists, however, maintain crimes motivated by a personās sexual orientation or gender identity are not properly prosecuted.
“This is not just a homicide, it is the cruelest expression of a society that still allows the dehumanization of LGBTQ+ people,ā said a statement from Fundación Iguales, one of Chileās main LGBTQ organizations. āWe demand truth, justice, and guarantees of non-repetition.ā
The Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation (Movilh), meanwhile, indicated that “since the first day the family contacted us, we have been in conversations with the Prosecutor’s Office so that this fatal outcome is thoroughly investigated, including the possible existence of homophobic motivations or components.ā
The investigation into Albornozās murder continues, and the court has imposed a 90-day deadline for authorities to complete it.
Argentina
Two trans women document Argentina military dictatorship’s persecution
Carolina Boetti and Marzia Echenique arrested multiple times after 1976 coup

Editor’s note: Washington Blade International News Editor Michael K. Lavers was on assignment in Argentina and Uruguay from April 2-12, 2025.
ROSARIO, Argentina ā Two transgender women in Argentina’s Santa Fe province are documenting the persecution of trans people that took place during the brutal military dictatorship that governed their country from 1976-1983.
Carolina Boetti and Marzia Echenique created the TravestĆ Trans Santa Fe Archive, which seeks to “create a collective memory,” in 2020. (“TravestĆ” is the Spanish word for “crossdresser.”)
The archive, among other things, includes interviews with trans women who the dictatorship arrested and tortured. The archive also contains photographs from that period.
The archive is not in a specific location, but Boetti and Echenique have given presentations at local schools and universities. They have also spoken at a museum in Rosario, the largest city in Santa Fe province that is roughly 200 miles northwest of Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital, that honors the dictatorship’s victims.
Boetti and Echenique during an April 11 interview at a Rosario hotel said they are trying to raise funds that would allow them to digitize the archive and house it in a permanent location.
“We have this material that is fantastic,” said Boetti.
The Associated Press notes human rights groups estimate the dictatorship killed or forcibly disappeared upwards of 30,000 people in what became known as the “dirty war.” The dictatorship specifically targeted students, journalists, labor union leaders, and anyone else who it thought posed a threat.
The dictatorship first detained Echenique in 1979 when she was 16. She said it targeted her and other trans women because they were “not within that strict” binary of man and woman.
“There was a dictator during the dictatorship, and he dictated this binarism, and there was no other way than man or woman,” Echenique told the Blade. “Everything else was penalized, deprived of all rights. They took away everything.”
Boetti was 15 when the dictatorship first detained her.
“They detained me because of my sexual orientation,” she told the Blade. “Homosexuality in those years was penalized under the law.”
Boetti said the law in 1982 ā the year when she began her transition ā penalized crossdressing, prostitution and vagrancy with up to 120 days in jail. Boetti told the Blade that authorities “constantly detained me” from 1982 until she left Argentina in the 1990s.
Echenique said the regime once detained her for six months.
“The way of living, of studying, of walking freely down the street, of living somewhere, of sitting down to eat something in a bar or how we are sitting today, for example, was unthinkable in those years,” she said.
Echenique left Argentina in 1988, three years after the dictatorship ended. She returned to the country in 2006.
“The dictatorship ended in ’83, but not for the trans community,” she said.
Rosario and Santa Fe, the provincial capital, in 2018 implemented a reparation policy for trans people who suffered persecution under the dictatorship. They remain the only cities in Argentina with such a program.
Boetti on May 17, 2018, during an International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia ceremony over which then-Santa Fe Gov. Miguel Lifshitz presided became the first trans person in Argentina to receive reparations. Boetti receives a monthly pension of ARG 40,000 ($34.48) and a monthly stipend that pays for her health care.
Those who have received reparations successfully presented evidence to a judge that proved they suffered persecution and repression during the dictatorship. Boetti and Echenique pointed out that only 10 of the 50 trans women in Santa Fe who the dictatorship are known to have persecuted are still alive.

Post-dictatorship Argentina became global trans rights leader
Then-President Cristina FernĆ”ndez de Kirchner in 2012 signed Argentina’s landmark Gender Identity Law that, among other things, allows trans and nonbinary people to legally change their gender without medical intervention. The country in 2010 extended marriage rights to same-sex couples.
Then-President Alberto FernĆ”ndez, who is unrelated to Cristina FernĆ”ndez, in 2020 signed the Trans Labor Quota Law, which set aside at least 1 percent of public sector jobs for trans people. FernĆ”ndez in 2021 issued a decree that allowed nonbinary Argentines to choose an “X” gender marker on their National Identity Document or DNI.

Alba Rueda, a trans woman and well-known activist, in 2022 became Argentina’s special envoy for LGBTQ and intersex rights.
President Javier Milei has implemented several anti-trans measures since he took office in December 2023. These include a decree that restricts minors’ access to gender-affirming surgeries and hormone treatment and the dismissal of trans people who the government hired under the Trans Labor Quota Law.
Milei closedĀ the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Racism, a government agency known by the acronym INADI that provided support and resources to people who suffered discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and other factors. He also eliminated Argentina’s Women, Gender, and Diversity Ministry under which Rueda worked until FernĆ”ndez left office.

Gay Congressman Esteban Paulón, a long-time LGBTQ activist, in January filed a criminal complaint against Milei after he linked the LGBTQ community to pedophilia and made other homophobic and transphobic comments during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Paulón is among those who attended the 2018 ceremony during which Boetti received her reparations.
Echenique noted the restoration of democracy in Argentina did not end anti-trans discrimination and persecution in the country.
“We came from the period of the dictatorship, but we do not forget that everything didn’t end then,” she said. “The persecutions were worse than what we suffered during the period of the dictatorship once democracy returned.”

Boetti said she does not think Argentina will once again become a dictatorship under Milei.
“But unfortunately, there is a lot of harassment and a lot of hate speech,” said Boetti.
“There are now laws that protect us, but there is a fight for sure,” added Echenique. “I don’t think we’ll go back to how things were before, and that’s why I again emphasize the importance of archiving memory in this.”