Graduate Student Spotlight: Isabel Lewin-Knauer
Graduate Student Spotlight: Isabel Lewin-Knauer
Hello! My name is Isabel Lewin-Knauer and I am a first year JD/PhD student in Latin American history, working with Lina Britto. I study Colombia’s drug trade in the late 20th century and the role of transnational US law enforcement in the criminalization of the flows of drugs and people across borders.
Of course, studying the drug trade comes with its own unique set of challenges. As an illicit business, those involved are heavily incentivized to leave as little paper trail as possible – not exactly a historian’s ideal situation. My previous research focused on women in intimate relationships with traffickers, drawing on memoirs that scholars had largely dismissed as too sensationalized. With a more expansive view of what constituted a role in the drug trade, I found that women played well-defined and unique roles as their bodies were treated as a competitive space to negotiate power and status.
For my first-year paper I wanted to expand my study of women in the drug trade to understand their interactions with legal systems, governments, and cultural expectations as they crossed borders as part of transnational trafficking networks. While browsing court decisions related to drug smuggling, I came across a case describing a Colombian woman, referred to by the judge by her DEA code name “the Princess.” She had been coerced by her ex-husband into smuggling drugs into the US, and the DEA had threatened her with prosecution unless she agreed to become a confidential informant.
What made the case so exciting was not just the story, but the archive it produced. The everyday mechanics of US law enforcement operations in Colombia are almost impossible to study. The DEA is notoriously resistant to releasing documents about any international work, and what does surface tends to be heavily redacted and vague. In the absence of detailed records, we know very little about international US law enforcement activity in Latin America. But because the Princess sued the US government in 1997, fifteen years of litigation forced the DEA to produce extensive internal documentation. Thousands of pages of sworn testimony, internal communications, destroyed-evidence logs, and cross-examinations reconstruct, in detail, the daily (dys)functioning of a DEA operation inside Colombia.
As I pieced together the story, it became clear that the Princess’ story is an exciting window into the vast world of DEA undercover operations. Operation Princess, which revolved entirely around the use of this one informant, ran from 1991 through 1996 and introduced me to an array of fascinating characters: DEA agents stealing trafficker money, prosecutors blowing the Princess’ cover, traffickers doubling as government informants, and the DEA laundering drug proceeds on behalf of the very cartels it was investigating. The operation took place during a volatile moment of fracture and reformulation for both traffickers and US drug law enforcement. By the early 1990s, the leaders of Colombia’s most powerful cartels were being jailed, killed, or forced into hiding, and the hierarchies that they had built were splintering. As traffickers scrambled to renegotiate alliances and claim positions in the resulting power vacuum, the DEA – a young agency improvising its way through Colombia with broad leeway and minimal oversight – was searching for a new playbook to define and justify its role abroad.
My paper argues that, in this moment, information became the new currency, and the boundaries between traffickers and law enforcement blurred. The DEA needed intelligence it could not gather on its own, and traffickers needed protection, leverage, and access to state power. To bridge that gap, the DEA relied on confidential informants to do things its own personnel could not. At the same time, the US government was granting itself the legal cover to participate in the activities it was supposed to criminalize, including laundering drug proceeds and working alongside traffickers. What emerged was less a war between two sides than a mutually sustaining arrangement with confidential informants like the Princess at the center, translating between two worlds that officially claimed to be enemies. When those worlds did clash, the violence did not land on the institutions, it landed on the people in the middle.
The more I dig into this case, the more I find myself pulled toward a broader set of questions about how the drug war was conducted, by whom, and at whose expense. I look forward to continuing to develop this work at Northwestern and am grateful to the faculty who have helped guide me in my first year.