ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS Lilen Uy did the portraits of 19 of the Edsa 20, except that of Fidel Ramos. Lilen is a freelance photographer who does work mainly for glossy magazines and advertisers. She has been a professional photographer for 15 years. Last September, her exhibit, called "Portraits,' was shown at the Silver Lens Gallery. The portrait of Fidel Ramos is by Jay Directo of Agence France-Presse.

TWENTY YEARS ago, at the height of the people power revolt, Imelda Marcos, then holed up in Malacañang with her anxious family and a phalanx of remaining loyal troops, contemplated the possibility of her imminent, and vertiginous, fall. At about the same time, Cory Aquino, who had returned to Manila after taking shelter in a Carmelite convent in Cebu when the uprising broke out, was insisting to worried family and friends that she should join the throng that had gathered at Edsa despite the security problems that would pose.

While all this was going on, Bernabe ‘Ka Dante’ Buscayno, the legendary founder of the New People’s Army who had been rotting in a Marcos prison inside Camp Crame, was glued to his radio, following the events taking place just outside his cell and fervently wishing, “Please, please, let this end, let Marcos fall.”

Not far away but lost among the crowd that massed up outside Camp Crame was Nanay Mameng Deunida, a diminutive laundrywoman and feisty community leader from the teeming Manila slum of Leveriza. She was at Edsa as she had been in numerous other protests against Marcos. Sister Luz Soriano, an Assumption nun, was there, too, preparing sandwiches when the tanks came. She thought she would die in Edsa, but the soldiers manning the armored vehicles were daunted by the crowd of unarmed civilians before them and refused to fire.

Chito Gascon, then president of the University of the Philippines student council, was among the many young people who joined the revolt. He, too, thought that the end was near when the helicopter gunships hovered overhead, aiming at the crowd below. Instead, the pilots turned around, landed, and joined the rebel troops at the camp. Joe Concepcion, a wealthy industrialist who helped organize the election watchdog Namfrel was at Edsa as well, basking in the warmth of a celebratory crowd, some of whom hoisted the robust businessman on their shoulders while joyously shouting, “Namfrel! Namfrel!” Atom Araullo was then only three years old, but he was there, too, carried not by a jubilant crowd but by his activist parents who were eager to see Marcos go.

From February 22 to 25, 1986, the lives—and fates—of all these disparate men and women were tied together by what was taking place on a strip of highway. No other event in the last 20 years has brought Filipinos together like Edsa has. Whoever they were and wherever they came from, these men and women shared Edsa and they would remember it for the rest of their lives.

To many of those who were there, Edsa was a defining experience that determined the choices they would later make. The leaders of the military rebellion that set off the revolt—Gen. Fidel Ramos, Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, and Lt. Col. Gringo Honasan—were right in the center of the action in the two military camps on Edsa, and they would emerge powerful figures when the uprising ended, defining the nature and character of the democratic regime that followed.

Rene Saguisag, like other human-rights lawyers who fought Marcos, was advising Cory Aquino as she got ready for the presidency, and he, like his other lawyer-friends, would end up holding important posts in her government. They, too, sought to influence the course of the democracy that was re-established at Edsa, but did not always succeed.

Eggie Apostol was keeping her friend, the defense minister’s wife Cristina, company in hiding during the revolt while still publishing the fighting Philippine Daily Inquirer. The spunky daily would later emerge as the country’s largest and most influential newspaper.

Tessy Ang See and her husband, then seriously ill with cancer, were collecting food and money from Chinese-Filipino businessmen who discreetly supported the uprising. Chin Ben See would die a few months later, but the tumultuous years that followed would also see the rise of the Tsinoy business community to the heights of the Philippine economy, with Tessy Ang See there to act as their spokesperson as kidnappers targeted the new kings of post-Edsa prosperity.

Even those who weren’t physically at Edsa were profoundly touched by it. Raymundo Jarque, then a senior army officer in Pampanga, barricaded the highway with priests and nuns to prevent Marcos loyalists in the North from moving reinforcements to Manila. Nur Misuari, the fiery leader of the Moro secessionist movement, was then in exile in Libya, praying to his God for the same thing that the atheist Buscayno was. Romeo Intengan, the Jesuit who had fled the country six years earlier to escape Imelda Marcos’s wrath, was also in exile, albeit in Spain, and he, too, was making the same fervent prayer. Meanwhile, back home, contemplative nuns were on their knees in their convents; Manila Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin had told them, “Stretch out your arms and pray and fast and don’t eat solidly until I tell you. We are in battle and you are the powerhouses. And the moment we do not win the battle, you will have to fast until the end of your life.”

All these supplications must have helped for certainly the gods seemed to have smiled at Filipinos then. Not a drop of blood was spilled on Edsa. Instead the uprising was picnic, fiesta, religious festival, and carnival rolled into one.