In our mission to understand large-scale phenomena, it is helpful to maintain a perspective grounded in real happenings. Here, Jurgen Stock recounts a case in which it was necessary for Interpol to coordinate an almost laughable number of national police forces, each with a stake in a single act of international drug trafficking. By paying attention to human-scale stories and details, abstract concepts are crystallized in a form that is more relatable, memorable, and true to the lived experience of the individuals involved. Instead of gathering a diversity of perspectives, only to wash them out into a unifying theory, the objective shifts to the preservation of this diversity, and the representation of the tension that exists between them.
DateJune 27, 2015TitleThe Documentary: Inside InterpolSegment00:01:33 – 00:02:37Emmanuel Leclaire:
One Sunday morning—it was 8 o’clock—one of the staff was called by a private airplane company and said, “I just have a plane that was hijacked in Venezuela.” Very quickly it appeared that this case was of an extraordinary dimension. The plane belonged to a Malta company; it was managed by a Swiss company; the crew were from Germany and Austria; it came, the day before, from Trinidad and Tobago; the person who should have been in the plane was [of] Lebanese and Australian nationality; she [rented] the plane from a US company that sub-contracted to a Saudi Arabia company; and the ten criminals obliged the pilot to go to Benin. We coordinated with all involved countries. It was an incredible case. And finally, we managed to reroute this plane to Spain, where Spanish police discovered 1.7 tonne[s] of cocaine.