Comrade Norah

Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 155–169, 2010

Family Ties: The Political Genealogyof Shining Path’s Comrade Norah

JAYMIE PATRICIA HEILMAN

Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Family was central to the political life of Augusta La Torre (or ComradeNorah), the second-in-command of the Peruvian Communist Party-Shining Path (PCP-SL). La Torre was the daughter of a CommunistParty militant and the granddaughter of a prominent provincial politicalfigure. She was also the wife of Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman.La Torre’s familial history demonstrates the importance of parentaland grandparental contributions to Senderistas’ political formation, andsuggests that parents and children were sometimes united in their supportfor the Shining Path. La Torre’s family ties, however, have also lednumerous observers to question her revolutionary credentials.

Keywords: Augusta La Torre, Comrade Norah, family, marriage, ShiningPath.

Shrouded by her party’s flag, Augusta La Torre lay dead while her comrades drank, sangand danced in mourning. The only relative attending La Torre’s wake was her husband;her parents, siblings, aunts and uncles were all absent (Caretas, 1992: 26). That absencewas in many ways deceptive, for family was central to La Torre’s political life. Knownby the nom de guerre of Comrade Norah within the ranks of the Peruvian CommunistParty-Shining Path (PCP-SL), Augusta La Torre served as second-in-command of thatorganisation from 1980 until her 1988 death. As a leading PCP-SL militant, La Torrehelped wage a war notorious for its extreme uses of violence. From the May 1980 startof the Shining Path’s ‘People’s War’ until the 1992 capture of party founder AbimaelGuzman, Maoist PCP-SL rebels (or Senderistas), state forces and civilians fought bloodybattles that left some 69,000 Peruvians dead. Scholars have looked in many differentdirections to explain why so many young men and women joined the Shining Pathand its armed struggle (Degregori, 1989; Palmer, 1992; Kirk, 1997; Gorriti, 1999).This article furthers the debate, using the case of Augusta La Torre to highlight thesignificance of familial influence upon Senderistas’ political trajectories.

Several authors have noted the importance of family to the Shining Path. JournalistGustavo Gorriti has demonstrated the prominence of intermarriage between earlyShining Path members, many of whom were actually siblings. Such kin ties indeed ledthese founding militants to label themselves the ‘sacred family’ (Gorriti, 1990: 20).Historian Ponciano del Pino has likewise considered issues of family. Del Pino (1998)

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Jaymie Patricia Heilman

makes the compelling argument that familial needs undermined the PCP-SL, serving asa major impetus for resistance to the party. Recently, historian Lewis Taylor noted thatSenderistas prioritised recruitment along familial lines. In Taylor’s words, ‘brothers orsisters would enrol their siblings and cousins, children their fathers and mothers andvice versa’ (Taylor, 2006: 180). This article takes the consideration of family in a newdirection, demonstrating the importance of parental and grandparental contributionsto Senderistas’ political formation and life.

Augusta La Torre was the daughter of a Communist Party militant, the granddaughterof a leading provincial political figure, and the great niece of an early PeruvianCommunist Party member. She was also the wife of the Shining Path’s founder, AbimaelGuzman. Following the political trajectories of each successive generation in the LaTorre family–a process I label political genealogy–we can root Shining Path militants,and not just their party, in their deep historical context. While scholars such asColin Harding (1988), Orin Starn (1995), and journalist Gustavo Gorriti (1999) haveworked to understand the PCP-SL’s leaders through their political writings, offeringinsightful interpretations of Senderista ideology, attempts to analyse leading Senderistason a personal level have been less successful. Author Santiago Roncagliolio (2007),for example, stumbled in his recent effort to write a biography of Abimael Guzman.Roncagliolio discovered that Guzman’s reluctance to discuss his personal history,combined with the unwillingness of Guzman’s relatives and comrades to speak at lengthof Guzman’s life, rendered a biography nearly impossible. While I, too, encounteredhesitations and silences from interviewees disinclined to discuss Augusta La Torre, theAyacucho archives were rich with information about her family.

Assertions about the importance of family in the genesis and continuing support of arevolutionary are almost certain to be controversial. Without question, tracing politicalgenealogies across family lines is a problematic task. Many are the right-wing childrenof decidedly leftist parents, many are the spouses who hold opposing political views andmany are the siblings who make dramatically different political choices. Just as crucially,a given person’s political choices are heavily influenced by peers, teachers and the timesin which he or she lives. Yet we still must take seriously the political influence of family.Few would argue that a person’s morals, values, and religious beliefs are shaped byhis or her family. Why not political convictions, too? To speak of familial influenceon political trajectories is not to engage in determinism; it is instead to recognise theimportance of family as one factor among many in a given militant’s political evolution.

Claims of familial political influence will also not sit well with those who believethat a revolutionary comes to his or her cause solely because of her passion for socialjustice and the inherent rightness of the people’s struggle. Shining Path founder AbimaelGuzman himself voiced such sentiments. When asked by an interviewer from the pro-Shining Path newspaper El Diario if any of his relatives or friends guided him towardpolitics, Guzman demurred. He replied, ‘I would say that what has most influenced meto take up politics has been the struggle of the people’ (Guzman, 1988). The continuingimportance of family in a militant’s life also runs against many dearly held beliefs abouta revolutionary’s necessary independence from the constraints of friendship and familiallove (Pomper, 1979: 90). Guzman asserted as much when he claimed that he had nofriends, only comrades (Guzman, 1988). Yet however controversial a consideration ofpolitical genealogy may be, the centrality of family in Augusta La Torre’s politicalformation, life and legacy makes such an investigation worthwhile.

A focus on parental and grandparental influence upon Shining Path militants alsoraises a counterpoint to arguments about the importance of generational conflict to

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Family Ties

the emergence of the Shining Path. Scholars such as Carlos Ivan Degregori (1998) andMiguel La Serna (2008) have demonstrated how tensions between rural youth andolder community members factored into the rise of the PCP-SL in the countryside.These arguments about generational conflict are insightful, but there is another story tobe told about relations between parents and children with regard to the Shining Path:one of generational concurrence. The case of Augusta La Torre demonstrates that, onoccasion, parents and children could be united in their support for the PCP-SL and itsviolent struggle. While Augusta La Torre was herself exceptional, her situation was notunique. In the Huanta, Ayacucho district of Luricocha, for example, peasants testifiedthat the entire Yauri* family ‘walked with Sendero Luminoso’ while another witnessasserted that Eduardo Gutierrez,* his wife, and their two daughters were all involvedwith the PCP-SL (Interview 200649, 2002; Interview 200615, 2002).1 The relevanceof familial political influence also stretches back in time and across to other Peruvianpolitical organisations. In my closing reflections, I use the lines of family to drawconnections between the PCP-SL and the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana(APRA).

Lastly, this article argues for a cautionary approach to matters of the family, showingthat too heavy a focus on familial relations can overshadow the political ideas, effortsand legacy of a given militant. La Torre’s marriage to Abimael Guzman has led numerousobservers to call her revolutionary credentials into question. Because the denials of LaTorre’s political capacity and relevance have been so frequent and so vehement, thisarticle begins with an extended discussion of Augusta La Torre’s political work.

From Augusta La Torre to Comrade Norah

Augusta La Torre’s political career began in 1962, when she joined the PeruvianCommunist Party (Iparraguirre, 2003: 8). Upon the PCP’s 1964 fracture into pro-Chinaand pro-Soviet lines, La Torre chose the Maoist PCP-Bandera Roja (Romero,* 2005).Bandera Roja soon called upon La Torre to further her political education; she andAbimael Guzman travelled to China in March 1965 and spent five months training inan officers’ school. While in China, La Torre undertook both intellectual and practicaltraining, receiving lessons in Marxist and Maoist philosophy as well as instruction inmilitary tactics and strategies (Guzman, 2002: 15; Iparraguirre, 2003: 8).

Augusta La Torre played a significant role in the factional divides and permanentruptures that riddled Peru’s Left after the Sino-Soviet split. While La Torre joined theMaoist PCP-Bandera Roja upon the 1964 split, she and Guzman also immediatelyfounded the splinter ‘Red Fraction’ that challenged, but did not fully break from,the lawyer Saturnino Paredes’s leadership of Bandera Roja. At the regional level, LaTorre regularly attended the meetings and demonstrations of other leftist parties, takingcareful note of those rival parties’ ideas, opinions and plans, and then reporting herfindings to her own Maoist comrades (Silva, 2005). La Torre also contributed to thedefinitive split between Bandera Roja and the Red Fraction, a break that culminatedin the 1970 formation of the PCP-SL. Elena Iparraguirre–the PCP-SL militant whoranked third inside the party’s Central Committee during the 1980s and who marriedGuzman after La Torre’s death–recalled that Augusta La Torre ‘worked in the ferocious

1 Names followed by an asterisk are pseudonyms.

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struggle that those of Bandera Roja, those of Paredes, made against her’ (Iparraguirre,2003: 13).

Augusta La Torre’s work was significant enough to catch the attention of governmentofficials. A 1969 government report noted La Torre’s political activities, and regionalauthorities did not let her radicalism go unpunished. La Torre’s highly visibleparticipation in the education protests that rocked Ayacucho and Huanta in June1969 led to her arrest and brief imprisonment that same month (Documenting thePeruvian Insurrection, 2005e).2 Jail did not temper La Torre’s politics. She forcefullypromoted the PCP-SL at a 1973 miners’ congress in La Oroya and she staunchlydefended Marxism in a 1975 debate with Peruvian intellectual Carlos Franco (Hume,1998: 45; Iparraguirre, 2003: 10). In 1976, La Torre became Secretary of the PCP-SL’sNorthern Regional Committee; that same year, La Torre was named to the PCP-SL’sPolitical Bureau (Iparraguirre, 2003: 11, 14).

Much of Augusta La Torre’s political work in the 1960s and 1970s involved effortsto mobilise women. She and Guzman established the Women’s Popular Centre upontheir return from China in 1965, and La Torre soon assumed the leadership of thisorganisation (Iparraguirre, 2003: 8; Documenting the Peruvian Insurrection, 2005a).The Women’s Popular Centre was less an institution than a movement, with memberssponsoring talks and raising political awareness through the production and distributionof written propaganda (Movimiento Femenino Popular, 1975: 64; Documenting thePeruvian Insurrection, 2005c). Augusta La Torre, Elena Iparraguirre and a third PCP-SLmilitant also authored the 67-page book El marxismo, Mariategui, y el movimientofemenino (Movimiento Femenino Popular, 1975; Iparraguirre, 2003: 8).

La Torre’s efforts to channel women into the PCP-SL continued via the Women’sPopular Movement. Founded in late 1974 as one of the PCP-SL’s so-called ‘generatedorganisms’, the Women’s Popular Movement formed from the fusion of the Women’sPopular Centre and the Women’s University Front at the Universidad Nacional SanCristobal de Huamanga (UNSCH). Augusta La Torre was that movement’s unequivocalfounder and leader (Iparraguirre, 2003: 8–10; Documenting the Peruvian Insurrection,2005c). While the Women’s Popular Movement first emerged in Ayacucho, AugustaLa Torre and other members of the movement worked to nationalise the organisation.Government sources noted the presence of the Women’s Popular Movement in Arequipaand in Lima shantytowns, while Iparraguirre recalled that ‘we travelled to all parts ofour country’ (Iparraguirre, 2003: 10). Abimael Guzman similarly remembered that theWomen’s Popular Movement ‘did work throughout the country, we went to all thelittle towns, we held meetings and women shared their problems there, the same withuniversity students’ (Guzman, 2002: 71).

Through her work with the Women’s Popular Movement, Augusta La Torre regularlydenounced Peru’s military government. In a 1975 speech in Arequipa, La Torre railedagainst the military government, telling the assembled crowd that the regime was‘utilising women for capitalist, pro-imperialist and feudal interests’ (Documenting thePeruvian Insurrection, 2005a: 12). Similarly, during the First Convention of WomenWorkers in Lima, La Torre described the military government as bloodthirsty andinhumane, and she stated that the goal of that Women Workers’ Convention was

2 A guide to this microfilm collection is available on the internet; see Guide to theMicrofilm Edition of Documenting thePeruvian Insurrection (n.d.).


Family Ties

to ‘unite the people against the regime’ (Documenting the Peruvian Insurrection,2005a: 12).

Having proven herself a dedicated and militant activist, La Torre won a key positioninside the PCP-SL: in 1980, PCP-SL militants voted her into the Shining Path’s PermanentCentral Committee, allotting her the second highest position of leadership in the party(Iparraguirre, 2003: 11, 14). That same year, La Torre assumed leadership of thePCP-SL’s Andahuaylas-Cangallo Zonal Committee. This committee was at that timethe most important of all the PCP-SL’s regional committees, as it was the zone wherethe PCP-SL initiated its war and where it won significant popular support (Iparraguirre,2003: 15; Documenting the Peruvian Insurrection, 2005b). La Torre also led the PCP-SL’s first major guerrilla action. While the People’s War had its official start with the17 May 1980 burning of ballot boxes in Chuschi, the first bloodletting did not occuruntil the 24 December 1980 attack on the Hacienda San Agustın de Ayzarca in Pujas.It was Augusta La Torre who led this attack. As Elena Iparraguirre explained it, ‘this isextremely important, because under her direction, the first guerrilla action came to becarried out’ (Iparraguirre, 2003: 14).

Augusta La Torre retreated from the countryside in 1982 to focus on strategising,planning the PCP-SL’s actions with Abimael Guzman and Elena Iparraguirre, the twoother members of the three-person Central Committee. La Torre’s work in the PCP-SL’sCentral Committee continued up until her November 1988 death from still-unknowncauses (Roncagliolio, 2007: 131–132). Discussion of the final years of La Torre’slife cannot go beyond the stuff of rumour. From her 1979 entrance into ‘profoundclandestinity’ alongside Guzman until her 1988 death, La Torre lived in hiding andthe details of her political actions and everyday life are known only to those PCP-SLmilitants who lived alongside her.

Family Lines: The Political Genealogy of the La Torres

Augusta La Torre was certainly not the first of her family to draw the ire of Peruvianauthorities. That dubious honour instead belonged to her paternal grandfather, CarlosLa Torre Cortez. Born in 1887, La Torre Cortez jumped to local political prominencein January 1923, when he was arrested following a heated argument with Huanta’ssubprefect. Testifying about his stint in jail, La Torre Cortez charged that the subprefectand his prison guards had grossly abused their power, holding him incommunicado,denying him food, stripping him of his clothing and forcing him to bathe. Compoundingthe mistreatment and humiliation, guards raised human excrement to La Torre Cortez’smouth, pressing him to ingest the waste (Ayacucho Regional Archive (ARA), 1923b:10). Upon winning his freedom, La Torre Cortez headed up a crowd of dozens of menwho angrily confronted the subprefect, pushing authorities to charge La Torre Cortezwith ‘contempt and other crimes’ (ARA, 1923b: 27).

That incident was only the start of Carlos La Torre Cortez’s political notoriety.Together with over 40 other hacendados and middle-class professionals from acrossHuanta, La Torre Cortez formed the the Rights of Man Defence League in 1923. Thisgroup lobbied intensively against the policies of President Augusto B. Leguıa, voicingparticular opposition towards the government’s proposed taxes on coca and alcohol,and denouncing the Conscripcion Vial, a programme of forced highway constructionlabour. La Torre Cortez was at the forefront of these efforts (ARA, 1923a). In January1924, Huanta’s subprefect complained that ‘Mr. La Torre is one of the venal men who



wish to see the Indians rise up and demand the repeal of this [Conscripcion Vial] Law,the Coca Tax, and the State Alcohol Monopoly’ (ARA, 1924). La Torre Cortez andhis allies also made heated calls for the Leguıa government’s downfall, promoting thecandidacy of Leguıa’s rival in the 1924 presidential elections and even inciting Huanta’spopulation to violence against the Leguıa government (ARA, 1924).

Carlos La Torre Cortez and his supporters were protesting policies that ran counter totheir economic interests; the taxes, like highway conscription, threatened their profits aswell as the availability of peasant labour to generate those profits. But La Torre Cortez’sinterests were not limited to economics. He was also drawn to politics for the sakeof politics, seeking election to Peru’s Chamber of Deputies in the 1924 congressionalelections. Between October 1923 and January 1924, members of the Rights of ManDefence League made repeated visits to the district of Luricocha, publicising La Torre’scandidacy. The district’s mayor recounted that, ‘they went all over the town, pressingpeople to join their protest against the coca tax and promoting La Torre’s candidacyby casting him as the people’s anti-tax Savior’ (ARA, 1924). La Torre Cortez’s politicalactivities continued in subsequent years. He briefly supported APRA in the early 1930s,and by the 1940s, La Torre Cortez was firmly established inside the ranks of Huanta’sofficialdom. He served as president of the Provincial Electoral Jury in 1939, and he wasnamed Huanta’s mayor in 1941 (ARA, 1939: 1; ARA, 1941–1942, 6 January 1941,12 January 1942). In 1945, La Torre Cortez added his name to the long list of Huantacandidates seeking election to Peru’s Chamber of Deputies. As in 1924, he lost hiselectoral bid (Sierra, 1945: 4).

Politics evidently ran in the La Torre family. La Torre Cortez’s son, Carlos LaTorre Cardenas, proved just as politically engaged as his father. Like his father, CarlosLa Torre Cardenas took an active role in regional politics, participating in Huanta’sPublic Aid Society during the 1940s and serving on Huanta’s provincial council in theearly 1950s (ARA, 1942, 17 January; Sierra, 1951: 8). But unlike his father, Carlos LaTorre Cardenas joined the Ayacucho branch of the Peruvian Communist Party (PCP).As a PCP member, La Torre Cardenas enjoyed a moment of particular paternal pridein 1960, when his son Alejandro won a scholarship to the Patrice Lumumba People’sFriendship University in Moscow, a school that trained third-world students in technicalfields and Marxist philosophy (Silva, 2005).

Crucially, my interview questions about why Carlos La Torre Cardenas joined thePCP routinely received the same answer: his family. Edgar Romero, a pro-Soviet HuantaCommunist in his late 1960s, cited La Torre Cardenas’s mother and maternal uncle asthe main factor behind La Torre Cardenas’s attraction to the PCP, explaining that theserelatives were all Communist Party members (Romero, 2005). Franco Silva similarlyreferenced family when explaining Carlos La Torre Cardenas’s political development.According to Silva, La Torre Cardenas joined the Communist Party primarily becauseof the example set by his maternal uncle, a Huanta landlord who belonged to the PCPand had extensive experience in Argentina’s Communist Party (Silva, 2005).

Now, the phrase ‘Communist hacendado’ does not roll easily off the tongue; itsounds awkward at best, oxymoronic at worst. According to the logic of the PeruvianLeft–and of Marxists worldwide–landlords perpetrated and profited from the verysocio-economic injustices against which the Communist Party railed. Certainly, CarlosLa Torre Cardenas made no significant efforts to bring social justice or equality to hishacienda, the Iribamba estate. Silvio Medina* worked on that hacienda as a child, andhe remembered the family’s insistence on aristocratic formality. Medina recalled that,‘I attended to visitors when they came to eat lunch . . . I had my coat, very white, with a


Family Ties

tie, and my hair was neatly combed’ (Medina, 2003). It seems the only effort La TorreCardenas made to defend Iribamba’s workers came in 1955, when he pursued criminalcharges against an Iribamba peon for rape of an hacienda employee (ARA, 1955 SCJHuanta, file 1705, book 119: 1).

Yet Carlos La Torre Cardenas was a committed Communist Party member allthe same. Franco Silva worked through the seeming contradiction between La TorreCardenas’s political sympathies and his economic position by pointing to the La Torrefamily’s economic troubles in the late 1950s (Silva, 2005). The Iribamba hacienda fellinto debt, and Carlos La Torre Cardenas and his wife were forced to sell off theirurban Ayacucho properties (ARA, 1957: 634–635; ARA, 1957b: 935). Worse still,La Torre Cardenas had to take a job as a public employee in the city of Ayacucho,a far-from-prestigious post for the son of a prominent hacendado (Documenting thePeruvian Insurrection, 2005b). As Franco Silva phrased it, assuming that post was ‘ahumiliation, an embarrassment’ and heightened La Torre Cardenas’s sympathies for thePCP (2005).

Like her father and grandfather before her, Augusta La Torre Carrasco was drawnto politics. Born in 1945, Augusta La Torre Carrasco joined the Communist Partyat the age of seventeen (Iparraguirre, 2003: 8). Here again, family influence wasparamount. Franco Silva attributed Augusta La Torre’s politics to her father, explainingthat because Carlos La Torre Cardenas belonged to the PCP, ‘his daughter Augustaalready had a certain orientation, a certain disposition, before meeting Guzman’ (Silva,2005). The most obvious role Augusta La Torre’s parents played in her political lifewas that of ideological and personal matchmakers: Carlos La Torre Cardenas and DeliaCarrasco introduced their daughter to Abimael Guzman. The relationship betweenGuzman and the La Torre family began in 1962, after Guzman accepted a teachingposition at the UNSCH (Documenting the Peruvian Insurrection, 2005a; Silva, 2005).Guzman sought out Carlos La Torre Cardenas because of their shared membershipin the PCP. Within two years of their first meeting, Carlos La Torre Cardenas andGuzman were cooperating in their political work. In February 1964, the pair organiseda demonstration among UNSCH students. That same month, they travelled to a nearbyhacienda–a trip authorities insisted was intended to ‘subvert the peons of this hacienda’(Documenting the Peruvian Insurrection, 2005b: 1).

The ties between Carlos La Torre Cardenas and Guzman, however, were more thanjust political. They were also personal. La Torre Cardenas and his wife Delia Carrascoheld Guzman in high esteem from the outset of their friendship. Delia Carrasco laterreflected that Guzman ‘was another son and, of course, the whole family loved him verymuch. We’ve always respected him’ (Everest, 1993: 9). Carlos La Torre Cardenas andDelia Carrasco regularly invited Guzman into their home. It was there that Guzman metthe couple’s young daughter, Augusta, and the pair soon became romantically involved,marrying in 1964. Without question, the marriage enjoyed the blessings of the bride’sfamily. At the ceremony, it was Augusta’s relatives, rather than the couple’s friends,colleagues, or comrades, who filled most of the seats. Some even speculate that themarriage happened because Augusta’s parents pressured her to marry the man they soesteemed (Silva, 2005).

It is difficult–probably even impossible–to gauge the impact of political genealogyupon Augusta La Torre’s life. We cannot say for certain whether La Torre wouldhave taken a different political path had her grandfather, father and great uncle beenresolutely apolitical. Nor can we prove that familial influence had more impact uponLa Torre than did any other factor. But even if we cannot make decisive statements



about familial impact upon La Torre’s political trajectory, placing La Torre inside herfamily’s long political lineage helps us ground her participation in what can otherwiseseem an enigmatic political party. La Torre grew up in a family where politicalactivity, party membership and protest against the Peruvian state were routine, makingit unsurprising that she too entered into radical politics. The fact that Augusta LaTorre’s siblings likewise joined the PCP-SL only bolsters this assertion. Augusta’s sisterGisela entered the PCP-SL and married Javier Esparza, one of the PCP-SL’s earliestmilitants (La Republica, 2003a). Augusta’s brothers Pablo and Juan were also accusedof collaboration with the PCP-SL (La Republica, 2003b). While such broad familialparticipation speaks to the fact that the Shining Path emphasised familial recruitment,as Lewis Taylor argues, this participation also reflects the importance of parental andgrandparental influence on youth’s political trajectory.

All in the Family

Testifying before Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Elena Iparraguirreasserted that upon joining the PCP-SL, she had to abandon familial connections outsidethe party. In her words, ‘I couldn’t go to school, work, nor attend to my family, none ofthat, so I quit school and broke ties with my family. It is a process that one has to follow’(Iparraguirre, 2003: 16). Iparraguirre was not the only Senderista to take such action.Leading PCP-SL militants Osman Morote and Teresa Durand left their children in thecustody of the children’s grandparents, just as Eduardo Mata and Yeny Marıa Rodriguezabandoned their newborn daughter so as to dedicate themselves to the revolution (delPino, 1998: 181). Guzman and Augusta La Torre themselves had no children, andthat childlessness was a conscious choice (cf. Roncagliolio, 2007: 58). Edgar Romeroremembered Guzman telling him that La Torre ‘did not want to have kids, because theyhad decided to be total revolutionaries and their kids would suffer’ (Romero, 2005).Yet while Shining Path’s top-ranking members spoke of the need to abandon familialconnections with relatives who remained outside the party’s ranks, those memberssometimes remained heavily dependent on such extra-party familial support.

From the first days of their marriage, Augusta La Torre and Abimael Guzman reliedupon her parents’ aid to make their political actions possible. Much of this support wasfinancial. Immediately after they wed, La Torre and Guzman moved in with her parentsin Ayacucho, and they made repeated use of her parents’ second home in Lima. AugustaLa Torre and Abimael needed this parental support because they struggled with thatmost common of familial problems: money. Augusta La Torre’s uncle Luis La Torrerecalled that the couple ‘lived in an extremely austere way’, and that they had ‘problemsbalancing their monthly budget’ (Gorriti, 1983: 13). The pair’s money troubles becameso desperate that Augusta La Torre had to seek money from her greatest enemy: thestate. She and her father took out a loan of around 10,000 soles in January 1970 fromthe Agricultural Development Bank. When Augusta La Torre was unable to repay thatloan on time, the bank initiated a lawsuit against her (ARA, 1972: 1). The couple’sfinancial situation grew even more precarious after April 1975, when Guzman’s politicalactivities and ill health cost him his job at the UNSCH (Documenting the PeruvianInsurrection, 2005b).

Carlos La Torre and Delia Carrasco were far from unaware of the young couple’spolitical ideas and efforts. Years later, Delia Carrasco recalled Guzman with fondness,remembering that ‘talking to him was like being awakened to a new reality. It was


Family Ties

a great satisfaction to hear him–how he laid out different themes’ (Everest, 1993:8). Carlos La Torre, in turn, recalled that because the couple lived with him and hiswife, ‘We saw the enthusiasm that they put toward the revolution’ (Everest, 1993: 9).Carlos La Torre and Delia Carrasco even provided their daughter and son-in-law alocale for revolutionary preparations: their Iribamba hacienda in Huanta, co-ownedwith Carlos La Torre’s brother Luis. Abimael and Augusta travelled openly and oftento Iribamba during the late 1960s and into 1970, regularly taking fellow militants alongwith them (Documenting the Peruvian Insurrection, 2005a; Silva, 2005).

The Iribamba arrangement did not last long, however. Because Augusta La Torreand Guzman, along with other members of the nascent PCP-SL, were so vocal in theiropposition to the 1968–1980 military government, their frequent trips to Iribambaraised the suspicions of government officials. In June 1970, police raided the Iribambahacienda and detained Osman Morote and two other PCP-SL militants, arrestingthem on the grounds of undermining the military’s government’s agrarian reform.The authorities deemed Iribamba a ‘training centre for sabotage against the AgrarianReform’, and they arrested Guzman for being the ‘intellectual author’ of that sabotage(Documenting the Peruvian Insurrection, 2005a: 1). That arrest led to a four-monthstay in jail for Guzman, while Augusta was spared punishment. Although the Iribambaarrests were dramatic and the prison stays significant, those arrests brought only atemporary pause to Augusta and Abimael’s political activities on the hacienda. In April1978, the couple formed a military school on the estate to train PCP-SL militants inguerrilla warfare (Documenting the Peruvian Insurrection, 2005d).

Familial support for the PCP-SL must not, of course, be overstated. Even somemembers of Augusta La Torre’s family bitterly opposed Sendero and staunchly refusedto assist Augusta and Abimael. The most dramatic example of that opposition camefrom Augusta’s aunt and uncle, Adriana Cardenas and Eduardo Spatz. In 1978, AugustaLa Torre visited her aunt and uncle’s hacienda in Huanta, asking to purchase Spatz’slarge gun collection. When Spatz refused the request, a heated argument ensued.Augusta ended that argument with the pledge that, ‘You will be one of the first we’llburn’. Making good on La Torre’s promise, PCP-SL militants attacked the hacienda inNovember 1982 (Caretas, 1982: 14).

Within the limits of Augusta La Torre’s nuclear family, however, support for thePCP-SL remained strong throughout the 1980s. From late 1982 onward, that supportcame from abroad, as Carlos La Torre, Delia Carrasco, and three of Augusta’s siblingsfled to Sweden to escape arrest for their involvement with the PCP-SL. The family’sinternational work for Sendero began when Augusta’s brother-in-law Javier Esparzacontacted Abimael Guzman with a proposal to extend the PCP-SL’s propaganda warinto Europe (Caretas, 1986: 46). And so, in the closing days of 1982, Esparza organisedthe Ayacucho Studies Circle to advance the PCP-SL’s cause. Comprised primarily ofAugusta’s relatives, the group published a newspaper and distributed flyers, and it stageda public demonstration on Labour Day 1983. Such activities continued in subsequentyears; several Ayacucho Studies Circle members were detained by Swedish authoritiesin 1986 after distributing Senderista propaganda and painting pro-Sendero graffiti onthe walls of the Peruvian embassy in Stockholm (Caretas, 1991: 38, 94).

What is perhaps most surprising about the La Torre Carrasco family’s support for thePCP-SL is that it continued long after Augusta’s 1988 death. Upon Abimael Guzman’sdramatic 1992 arrest, Carlos La Torre and Delia Carrasco rushed to his defence, hiringhim a lawyer. As Delia Carrasco told the leftist newspaper Revolutionary Worker,‘we love him and we feel very strongly for him . . . I feel proud of Abimael Guzman



and happy to know him, but at the same time I feel saddened by the arrest’ (Everest,1993: 9). The elderly couple were especially active in the campaign to spare Guzmanthe death penalty. The pair attended the February 1993 Founding Conference of theInternational Emergency Committee to Defend the Life of Abimael Guzman. At thatconference, Carlos La Torre stated, ‘We will defend his life, as long as our lives remain’(International Emergency Committee, 1993: 31). Certainly, much of Carlos La Torreand Delia Carrasco’s support was driven by emotional and personal connections. Theyloved Guzman as a son-in-law, and by defending him, they were implicitly defendingtheir own reputations and that of their deceased daughter. But it is also the casethat Carlos La Torre and Delia Carrasco were motivated by politics, continuing tobelieve–despite all the devastation wrought by the war–that the PCP-SL’s struggle wasjustified. Carlos La Torre in fact told a Revolutionary Worker reporter that he, ‘wouldlike to assure the readers of the paper that the People’s War in Peru will surge forward’(Everest, 1993: 9). Augusta La Torre’s family remained committed to her party longafter her life had ended.

Wedded to the Cause

Just as family contributed to Augusta La Torre’s formation as a political militantand sustained her political career, family has also had a detrimental impact upon herhistorical legacy. Within the ranks of the PCP-SL, La Torre’s reputation is solid; she iscelebrated as the party’s ‘Greatest Heroine’. Guzman eulogised La Torre as a, ‘Daughterof the people and the international proletariat. Bright red flag, defiant in the face ofthe storm. The greatest heroine of the Party and the revolution!’ (Everest, 1993: 8).Elena Iparraguirre, in turn, stressed that La Torre ‘was a very kind woman, she had anabsolute generosity, that is why she is the Party’s greatest heroine. Completely generous,she gave everything from her person, absolute’ (Iparraguirre, 2003: 22). One imprisonedShining Path militant similarly described La Torre as ‘the greatest heroine of the partyand the Revolution’. This same man spoke of La Torre’s ‘indelible and shining exampleof giving her life to the Party, the Revolution, and communism’ (Interview SCO 30907, 2002: 53).

The PCP-SL’s official line on Augusta La Torre–a line enforced through the party’spolicy of democratic centralism–differs dramatically from numerous popular castingsof the woman. Observers have often mobilised Augusta La Torre’s marriage to AbimaelGuzman to deny her capacity and relevance as a PCP-SL militant. Sometimes, that denialis sympathetic, seeking to excuse La Torre from the atrocities her party committed. OneHuanta campesino, for example, insisted that the only reason ‘Senora Augusta’ joinedShining Path was because of her love for her husband, not because she supported theparty’s ideals or its plans (Vargas,* 2005). Many of the individuals with whom writerRobin Kirk spoke offered a similar explanation for La Torre’s politics, claiming that LaTorre’s devotion to her husband translated into devotion to his party. As Kirk herselfphrased it: ‘If Guzman had been a doctor, she would have run his office. An architect,and she would have schooled herself in design’ (Kirk, 1997: 90).

In other cases, the denial of La Torre’s political radicalism is anything butfriendly. Leading Senderista Oscar Ramırez Durand (Comrade Feliciano) repeatedlyasserted that La Torre’s position in the PCP-SL owed to her sexual relationshipwith Guzman and Guzman’s own megalomania. Ramırez insisted that La Torre–andElena Iparraguirre–held their prestigious positions in Shining Path’s Central Committee


Family Ties

solely because Guzman ‘fantasised about being alone, surrounded by women in thePolitical Bureau’ (Caycho, 2005: 47). Ramırez similarly asserted that Guzman wantedto ‘establish a clan . . . a fiefdom’ and he derided La Torre and Iparraguirre as Guzman’s‘mujercitas’ (little women), his ‘girlfriend number one and his girlfriend number two’,and his ‘two Geishas’ (Ramırez Durand, 2002a: 24, 28, 34).

Ramırez Durand stressed La Torre’s role as both wife and political inferior to casther only as an obedient follower, working as Guzman’s proverbial yes-woman. LaTorre, by Ramırez Durand’s telling, held power only because she saw Guzman ‘asa genius, he was never wrong’ and because his influence over her and Iparraguirreallowed Guzman to concentrate power in his own hands (Ramırez Durand, 2002b: 28).Ramırez Durand also blamed La Torre for initiating the notorious cult of personalitysurrounding Guzman. Testifying before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,Ramırez Durand asserted that, ‘Norah started this in 1982, 1983 . . . It was Norah whoinitiated these things, ‘‘I bow my head before the Party and before President Gonzalo’’ ’(Ramırez Durand, 2002b: 49).

Ramırez Durand’s claims are easy to dismiss, for his anger toward Guzman, LaTorre, and Iparraguirre represents a case of political jealousy at its most extreme. Notonly did La Torre and Iparraguirre rank directly above Ramırez, keeping him outof Shining Path’s Central Committee until La Torre’s 1988 death, but the PCP-SL’sadherence to the principle of democratic centralism meant that Ramırez had to acceptthe policies that Guzman, La Torre, and Iparraguirre imposed. Remaining free at themoment of Guzman and Iparraguirre’s 1992 capture, Ramırez adamantly opposedthe pair’s post-arrest decision to pursue a peace treaty with the Peruvian government.Ramırez thus broke from the PCP-SL, leading a splinter group and continuing to fightthe People’s War until his arrest in 1999 (Caycho, 2005: 45).

But even though Ramırez’s motives render his assertions suspect, he is hardly the onlyindividual to use the familial ties of marriage to dismiss the political relevance of AugustaLa Torre, or of Senderista women in general. A retired female university professorlikewise cast the female Senderista spouses of male Sendero militants as uncomplicatedpolitical followers. ‘The wives were like that’, the ex-professor explained, ‘loyal totheir husbands and therefore the Party’ (Kirk, 1997: 78). In his otherwise tremendouslysensitive article on familial relations and the Shining Path, historian Ponciano del Pinosimilarly wrote of Senderista ‘patriarchs delivering entire families to the party’ (del Pino1998: 181–182). To explain women’s prominence in the PCP-SL primarily throughreference to their husbands is to deny women’s choices, experiences, and agency, eveninside a political party known for its sexism and patriarchal attitudes (Vega-Centeno1994; Coral Cordero, 1998; Henrıquez Ayın, 2006). Elena Iparraguirre herself stressedthat she joined the PCP-SL out of frustration at the sexism inside other leftist parties.Speaking to the Truth Commission, she explained her move from the PCP-Patria Roja(Red Fatherland) into Guzman’s splinter Red Faction of the PCP-Bandera Roja andhis sub-group, the ‘fourteenth of July National Committee’. As she phrased it, ‘Whatdid Patria want? For women to go out and get chickens . . . unacceptable. But in the‘‘fourteenth of July National Committee’’ we were equal in everything, we did the samethings’ (Iparraguirre, 2003: 7).

For the case of Augusta La Torre, there is more than enough evidence to demonstratethat she was much, much more than simply her husband’s ‘mujercita’. Certainly, thepolitical efforts outlined at the start of this article reflect the work of a dedicated politicalactor. Several observers have also commented on La Torre’s political radicalism. AsEdgar Romero told me, ‘She was more radical than [Guzman] was, and for that



reason it is speculated that within Sendero’s lines, as she was more radical, maybe theykilled her internally’(Romero, 2005). Others speak of the influence La Torre had uponGuzman. A Huamanga schoolteacher described La Torre as a ‘woman of passionateconvictions and definitive decisions’, asserting that Guzman had initially consideredabandoning politics in favour of a strictly academic life but that ‘Augusta would notpermit it’ (Gorriti, 1983: 13). Gilberto Hume remembered seeing Augusta La Torre ata 1973 miners’ congress, thinking her indefatigable because she attended every sessionshe could and because she repeatedly stressed her party’s line. As Hume recalled, ‘westarted to call her The Evangelist’ (Hume, 1998: 45). Yet even these comments subtlydownplay Augusta La Torre’s political significance, evaluating her only in relation toher husband and failing to treat her as a militant in her own right. Family–in the formof her husband–has effectively overshadowed Augusta La Torre’s political legacy.

Conclusions

Behind every great man, there stands a woman. Or so the tired old adage tells us.Augusta La Torre’s case offers a new spin on that dictum: behind (many) a leader, therestands a family. For Augusta La Torre and her relatives, political ideology and actionswere family affairs; La Torre’s relatives actively participated in politics before, during,and after her short life. Moreover, issues of family have shaped her historical legacy.

Without understating all that was unique about Augusta La Torre’s personaland political life, we can nonetheless say that her political genealogy has manyechoes in contemporary Peruvian history. Keiko Fujimori provides one obviousexample. The daughter of ex-President Alberto Fujimori, Keiko Fujimori is presentlya Congresswoman and there is widespread speculation that she will run for Peru’spresidency in 2011 should her father’s recent conviction for human rights abuses blockhis own candidacy. Ms. Fujimori is also joined in the Congress by her uncle, SantiagoFujimori, brother of the former president (El Comercio, 2008: A6).

Yet while the Fujimori family dominates today’s headlines, it is the family of APRAfounder Vıctor Raul Haya de la Torre that provides some of the most interestingparallels with Augusta La Torre (no relation). As was true of Augusta La Torre,Haya was nested inside a highly politicised family. Haya’s father was a CongressionalDeputy for Trujillo, holding that post from 1906 to 1912 (Klaren, 1973: 90). LikeAugusta La Torre, Haya was joined inside his party by several of his relatives. Haya’sbrother Agustın was an active participant in APRA’s early struggles (Klaren, 1973: 127,129, 139) and Haya’s cousin Marcela Pinillos Ganoza was an Aprista (Dıaz, 2007:129–132). In addition, Haya’s parents provided him with important familial supportfor his early political efforts. In 1931, Haya and several other Aprista militants utilisedhis parental home both to formalise their political plans and to hide out from police(Dıaz, 2007: 50). These parallels give weight to historian Jose Luis Renique’s recent callfor a comparative consideration of Haya de la Torre and Abimael Guzman (Renique,2003: 148). If we recognise that Guzman shared Augusta La Torre’s familial politicalconnections and dependencies through his position as her husband then Guzman andHaya exhibit some significant familial similarities.

The issue of familial ties also offers grounds for a broad comparison betweenthe PCP-SL and APRA as parties. APRA was arguably as dependent upon familialparticipation as was the Shining Path. Within the early APRA, the brothers of Trujillo’sSpelucın family proved dedicated and militant Apristas, ascending to leadership posts


Family Ties

inside the nascent party (Klaren, 1973: 147). In addition, historian Lewis Taylor hasdemonstrated the prominence of ‘historic’ Aprista families in Cajamarca, where Apristasons followed the political trajectory of their Aprista fathers. Taylor also notes theprominence of sibling participation within Cajamarca’s APRA (Taylor, 2006: 151).Similar patterns emerged inside the department of Ayacucho. Within the district ofCarhuanca, the brothers Vidal and Augusto Cardenas both belonged to APRA in the1930s, and Vidal’s son stood as the district’s Aprista candidate in the 2003 municipalelections (Heilman, 2006: 189).

These connections between APRA and the PCP-SL exist on more than just anacademic level. Crucially, many Shining Path militants were the daughters and sons ofApristas. Augusta La Torre was herself the grand-daughter of an Aprista, even if CarlosLa Torre Cortez’s affiliation with APRA was only fleeting. Elena Iparraguirre, in turn,was the daughter of an Aprista militant (Iparraguirre, 2003: 5). The familial ties betweenSenderistas and Apristas also existed at the level of rank-and-file party members. Insidethe district of Carhuanca, many of the individuals who joined the PCP-SL were thechildren of once-prominent local Apristas (Heilman, 2006). These examples are telling.Not only do these cases show the importance of family political influence, they alsosuggest that some Senderistas had looked upon their Aprista parents’ shortcomings anddisappointments as revolutionaries and decided that a new, far more violent, politicalpath was necessary. For Augusta La Torre, and for many other Peruvians, politicsbound the ties of family.

Acknowledgements

My warm thanks to G. McCormick, I. Rodrıguez Silva, and participants in the DalhousieStokes Seminar.

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