Augusta La Torre

Augusta Deyanira La Torre Carrasco (29 August 1946 – 14 November 1988), also known as Comrade Norah, was a Peruvian communist, recognized as the number two in command of the guerrilla group Shining Path. La Torre's influence on her husband, Shining Path founder Abimael Guzmán, is credited with establishing equality for women with regard to participation within the revolutionary organization, and during its militant actions.

Biography La Torre was born in Huanta in 1946 into a land-owning family with a prominent political lineage, later leaving to study in Ayacucho as a teenager. The daughter of Communist party leader Carlos La Torre Córdova and Delia Carrasco, "she grew up in a family where political activity, party membership and protest against the Peruvian state were routine, making it unsurprising that she too entered radical politics."

She joined the Peruvian Communist Party in 1962 at the age of 17. La Torre also encouraged Guzmán to establish the Popular Women's Movement in Ayacucho in 1965. Abimael Guzmán with his fist raised during La Torre's funeral. La Torre was instrumental in helping Guzmán to create the Shining Path (known in Spanish as the Sendero Luminoso). On 24 December 1980, the beginning of the "armed struggle" (Inicio de la Lucha Armada), she led one of the first attacks of the Shining Path, which targeted a small farm, Hacienda San Agustín de Ayzarca, and culminated in the torture and murder of the farm manager, Benigno Medina and a 19 year old worker named Ricardo Lizarbe. La Torre was succeeded as the group's number two by Elena Yparraguirre, who married Guzmán in 2010 after La Torre was declared legally dead.

In 2021, Peruvian journalist claimed that, according to evidence that included a police document with testimonies and a 400-page manuscript written by Guzmán after his 1992 capture, La Torre was assassinated on Guzmán's orders due to alleged disagreements with him and the risk of a schism, and that Guzmán had reportedly ordered that her remains never be found, while publicly stating that her cause of death was a suicide.