I don't mean to shield him from all criticism, and seeing as I'm cishet I'm sure it could be my own blind spot, but I seriously doubt that he was trying to do some kind of homophobic wordplay. We almost never use "homo" by itself to talk about gay people in Spanish. Maduro is relatively pro-LGBTQ and has historically been to the left of his party and the country as a whole on queer issues. I think there's a bit of danger in mapping English connotations of latin words to the same latin words being used in another language, because the connotations really aren't the same.