Even in Colombia, a country known for its paramilitary death squads, this hunting party stood out: more than a dozen soldiers from a Colombian army battalion, two Porsche salesmen armed with rifles, their assistant, and a taxidermist.
They stalked Pepe through the backlands of Colombia for three days in June before executing him in a clearing about 96km from here with shots to his head and heart. But after a snapshot emerged of soldiers posing over his carcass, the group suddenly found itself on the defensive.
As it turned out, Pepe — a hippopotamus who escaped from his birthplace near the pleasure palace built here by the slain drug lord Pablo Escobar — had a following of his own.
The meticulously organized operation to hunt down Pepe, carried out with the help of environmentalists, has become the focus of an unusually fierce debate over animal rights and the containment of invasive species in a country still struggling to address a broad range of human rights violations during four decades of protracted war with guerrillas.
“In Colombia, there is no documented case of an attack against people or that they damaged any crops,” said Anibal Vallejo, president of the Society for the Protection of Animals in Medellin, referring to the hippos. “No sufficient motive to sacrifice one of these animals has emerged in the 28 years since Pablo Escobar brought them to his hacienda.”
Sixteen years after the infamous Escobar was gunned down on a Medellin rooftop in a manhunt, Colombia is still wrestling with the mess he made.
Wildlife experts from Africa brought here to study Colombia’s growing numbers of hippos, a legacy of Escobar’s excesses, have in recent days bolstered the government’s plan to prevent them — by force, if necessary — from spreading into areas along the nation’s principal river. But some animal-rights activists are so opposed to the idea of killing them that they have called for the firing of President Alvaro Uribe’s environment minister.
Peter Morkel, a consultant for the Frankfurt Zoological Society in Tanzania, compared the potential for the hippos to disrupt Colombian ecosystems to the agitation caused by alien species elsewhere, like goats on the Galapagos Islands, cats on Marion Island between Antarctica and South Africa, or pythons in Florida.
“Colombia is absolute paradise for hippos, with its climate, vegetation and no natural predators,” Morkel said.
“But as much as I love hippos, they are an alien species and extremely dangerous to people who disrupt them,” he continued. “Since castration of the males is very difficult, the only realistic option is to shoot those found off the hacienda.”
The uproar has its roots in 1981, when Escobar was busy assembling a luxurious retreat here called Hacienda Napoles that included a Mediterranean-style mansion, swimming pools, a 1,000-seat bull ring and an airstrip.
“He needed a tranquil place to unwind with his family,” said Fernando Montoya, 57, a sculptor from Medellin who built giant statues here of Tyrannosaurus Rex and other dinosaurs for Escobar.
Hired by private administrators of the seized estate, part of which is now a theme park (imagine mixing Jurassic Park and Scarface into a theme), Montoya rebuilt the statues after looters tore them apart searching for hidden booty.
But Escobar was not content with just fake dinosaurs and bullfights. In what ecologists describe as possibly the continent’s most ambitious effort to assemble a collection of species foreign to South America, he imported animals like zebras, giraffes, kangaroos, rhinoceroses and, of course, hippopotamuses.
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