Far-left President of Colombia Gustavo Petro fired former gay pornographic actor Juan Carlos Florián as the nation’s “Equality Minister” amid ongoing scandals in the ministry, the Colombian newspaper El Colombiano reported on Wednesday.
Florián is a longtime LGBTQIA2 activist whom Colombian outlets described in the past as a close ally of Petro’s. Florián describes himself as a person of “non-hegemonic” gender and, during his tenure as minister, asked to be formally addressed as “ministra,” the Spanish word for a female minister. Florián refers to himself as “female” because, according to him, he is a “person and a f*ggot” but “is not gay.”
According to El Colombiano, Petro said in the past that, “I had read Marx with him [Florián] in Paris alongside a union of porn actors.”
Petro first appointed Florián as “Equality Minister” in September 2025, and his designation immediately sparked another controversy for the far-left president as his inclusion into the ministerial cabinet stood in violation of Colombia’s 2024 “Gender Parity” law. The law requires an equal 50/50 representation of men and women in high-ranking government positions. The situation prompted a local lawyer to file a lawsuit against Florián that saw him temporally leave office until Petro reshuffled his cabinet so that Florián would no longer break the gender parity. At the time, Florían’s lawyers argued that he should be excluded from “binary calculations” as “he does not identify as male.”
El Colombiano, citing unnamed high-ranking Colombian government sources, reported that Petro personally asked Florián to present his resignation from the ministry. The news followed an ongoing controversy over alleged irregularities involving a 55 billion Colombian peso (roughly $14.89 million) contract signed by Florián’s deputy minister Dumar Guevara. Florián was also involved in a scandal that first broke in December when alleged leaked text messages from Guevara featured insults against Petro’s eldest daughter Andrea Petro and her mother and Petro’s first ex-wife Luz Mary Herrán.
According to the source, Petro reportedly read the investigation over the leaked chats and decided to remove Florián, but waited a few weeks. The Colombian magazine Semana reported on December 9 that Guevara did not arrive to his office on that day and that he had already been notified of his dismissal. Semana reported at the time that the alleged leaked chats were from August 2025 and that it was unknown who leaked them.
The Colombian “Equality Ministry” is one of the most controversial policies implemented by Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president and a former member of the Marxist M19 terrorist group. Petro is presently in the final months of his highly controversial administration and is ineligible to run for president again, as the Colombian constitution states that a president may only serve for a single four-year term and does not allow reelection.
The Ministry was formally established in 2023. At the time, Petro appointed his Vice President Francia Márquez as its inaugural minister. Márquez resigned from the Ministry in February 2024 during a wider cabinet shakedown following Petro’s disastrous national broadcast where he mused about Greek eroticism and once again called for the legalization of cocaine, deeming the drug to be “not worse than whiskey.” Márquez has since then distanced herself from Petro and has publicly condemned his administration several times.
“I told the president that I did not want to expose myself to a higher level of violence by appointing Florián and that I was not going to appoint him. It was at that moment that I submitted my letter of resignation,” Márquez said during an August 2025 interview.
The future of the controversial Colombian “Equality Ministry” remains uncertain at press time. In 2024, the Colombian Supreme Court ruled that the bill that established its creation was “unconstitutional” on the grounds that it did not comply with procedures demanded by local legislation.
The top court gave a one-year deadline for the bill to be amended and resubmitted, which reportedly took place in April 2025. In December, Colombian lawmakers voted to dismiss a motion seeking to scrap the Equality Ministry bill — however, after consulting with Colombian Congressmen from various parties and goverment officials, El Colombiano reported that “there are no expectations that it will succeed.”
The Argentine outlet Infobae reported that Florián’s departure from the Ministry was confirmed through his absence in Petro’s first Council of Ministers meeting this year, which marks the 58th ministerial change in Petro’s cabinet since he took office at press time. His departure occurs amid yet another ongoing reshuffle of the Colombian executive that has seen the departure of the Director of the Administrative Department of the Presidency (Dapre) Angie Rodríguez and Jorge Lemus, who served as Director of the National Intelligence Directorate (DNI).
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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