Article 516 of Ecuador's Criminal Code, in its first paragraph, made homosexuality a crime punishable by four to eight years in prison. Two weeks before the raid, on May 30, 1997, the police received a letter asking that Bar Abanicos be closed. The letter carried signatures from local residents and the support of the faculty of jurisprudence of the Catholic University of Cuenca. It cited the immoral conduct of the clientele and the scandal the bar generated. Two other bars sat on the same block. Only the one hosting gay and transgender customers drew the letter, and only that bar drew the raid. Ten days after the night of violence, the newspaper El Comercio reported that the official police cause of arrest had been public scandal and indecent dress. Mayor Crespo himself later acknowledged that the detainees had not been in fights and were not semi-naked. The law existed. It was selectively enforced. The machinery worked exactly as designed.

The numbers vary by source. The OutRight Action International reported 14 people imprisoned that night. Years later, Cuéllar reaffirmed a figure of 63 detainees. Either number describes a group of people who had gone out to celebrate and who were dragged into a jail where officers submerged heads in toilets, delivered electric shocks, and permitted the sexual assault of prisoners. One person was raped by other inmates while in police custody, a fact OutRight Action International documented later. The newspaper El Tiempo, after the raid, ran a homophobic caricature depicting Cuéllar and Mayor Crespo under the headline Presos por fiesta sodomita. The public shaming was part of the punishment. The people who walked out of the jail when they were finally released carried injuries that no record fully captures and trauma that the existing language could barely name in 1997 Ecuador. They also carried something else: the knowledge that the only way forward was to not be silent.

The day they were released, Cuéllar and a friend met Jaime Terreros, a local LGBTQ activist in Cuenca who went by the name Terri. They told him what had happened. Terreros made a choice that in 1997 Ecuador was genuinely dangerous: he filed a formal complaint with the Human Rights Commission of Azuay. He approached the city's media, demanding less discriminatory coverage and describing the abuses that had occurred during the arrests. The coverage that followed was more measured than the caricature in El Tiempo had been, but Terreros paid for the effort. Police harassed him for months afterward. Students from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Cuenca tried to mount an installation in Calderón Park in favor of sexual diversity. The municipality - under what the article describes as the influence of people close to Opus Dei - refused permits. The students did it anyway, gathering in the park in the early morning to set up a bed with a sign reading Sáquenme de aquí - Get me out of here - and colored condoms filled with water. A few simple acts of visibility, in a city that had just shown what invisibility bought.

News of the raid reached FEDAEPS - the Fundación Ecuatoriana de Acción y Educación para la Promoción de la Salud - through a member of the Cuenca organization La Pájara Pinta, led at the time by Azuay's then-governor Felipe Vega de la Cuadra. Activists Orlando Montoya of FEDAEPS and Neptalí Arias of Famivida (Fundación Amigos por la Vida) traveled to Cuenca and held meetings with activists and personalities, including Governor Vega, who denounced the police actions. A strategy formed: challenge Article 516 before the Constitutional Court as unconstitutional. To bring the action required 1,000 signatures. The Permanent Assembly for Human Rights and the trans association Coccinelle led the collection. They gathered 1,400. In September 1997, the petition was filed. On November 25, 1997 - just over five months after the Bar Abanicos raid - the nine members of the Constitutional Court ruled unanimously in favor of repealing the first paragraph of Article 516. Two days later, the decision was published in the Official Gazette. Homosexuality was no longer a crime in Ecuador.

Cuenca is known internationally for its colonial architecture, its four rivers, its UNESCO World Heritage center. Visitors come to see the cathedral, the red-tiled roofs, the Tomebamba riverfront. Most never hear of Bar Abanicos. The bar is gone; the streets where it stood, Vargas Machuca and Juan Jaramillo, carry traffic through a pleasant urban grid. But in Ecuador's LGBTQ history, Cuenca in June 1997 is the turning point - the night when a particular form of state violence became undeniable and unbearable, and the months that followed when organizing overcame it. Coccinelle, the trans association that gathered signatures, still exists. Patricio Cuéllar, known as Brigitte - the first gay queen elected in Cuenca - lived long enough to see the laws change and longer still to tell the story. Jaime Terreros, called Terri, died in 2017; he was remembered as the activist who, almost by accident, marked LGBTQ activism in Ecuador. The people who were in Bar Abanicos that night should be remembered as the first reason a law ended. They went out to celebrate. They came back having made history they never chose to make.