More than 20 years after Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar died in a gunfight with police, a strange legacy survives him — his pet hippopotamuses.
Look out of the window in the dead of night in the village of Doradal and you might see one plodding down the street.
Police killed or locked up Escobar’s drug gang, but not the hippos in his private zoo.
Photo: AFP
Left to themselves on his Napoles Estate, they bred to become what is said to be the biggest wild hippo herd outside Africa — a local curiosity and a hazard.
“I was going to football training this morning about 6:30 and there was one in the meadow, opposite the school,” Lina Maria Alvarez, 12, said.
Just outside the village, Diego Alejandro Rojas, 19, shines a flashlight on a black mass grazing among the tall grass. Its eyes catch the light and shine like glowworms.
Photo: AFP
“They come from the Napoles Estate along the canal after nightfall,” Rojas said. “They are like the village pets. I’m more afraid of the snakes than the hippos.”
David Echeverri Lopez, a biologist from the regional environmental corporation Cornare, said it is the biggest herd of wild hippopotamuses outside of Africa.
The have thrived in this green spot in northern Colombia, but Echeverri warns they are a hazard for the local area and its environment. They break fences and defecate in the rivers.
“This is a paradise for them,” local veterinarian Jairo Leon Henao said. “They have no predators so they are more at peace than they would be in their natural habitat and they have been reproducing faster.”
Escobar bought four hippos from a zoo in California and flew them to his ranch in the early 1980s, Echeverri said. He now estimates there are about 35 in the area.
Doradal and the Escobar’s old ranch lie 190km from the city of Medellin, which gave its name to his cartel.
Escobar was one of the richest and most powerful criminals ever. His racket grew into a multimillion-dollar business that dominated the cocaine trade, and was blamed for numerous killings.
Like his gang, hippos can be very fierce, naturalists say.
“If they get aggressive they pose a risk to Colombian biodiversity. They could displace native fauna” such as otters and endangered manatees, Echeverri said.
“It is an invasive species and very resistant to everything. They carry diseases that can kill livestock,” Echeverri said, standing by the lake at Hacienda Napoles, where hippos’ giant snouts and ears poke out of the water.
They threaten fishing too.
“They pollute the water courses where they defecate,” Echeverri said.
Since hippos can live for up to 60 years, authorities are seeking a way to manage the herd over the long term. Costly and tricky attempts to castrate the hippos to curb their spread have not made much progress, Leon said. Only four have had the snip.
It is hard to tell whether a hippo is a male because its testicles are hidden inside, he said. If you do manage to grab a hippo before it disappears underwater, you have to put it to sleep and go groping around.
So for now, instead of going to war against the hippos as the Colombian police did against their late master, Echeverri and Leon are working just to contain them.
They are building barriers of rocks, trees and wire to keep the hippos from roaming too far, and growing fodder to keep them happy where they are.
The wandering hippos have been sighted up to 150km away.
Echeverri’s environmental agency has an annual budget of US$135,000, funded by loot seized from drug gangs.
“So far, fortunately, we have had no problems,” Leon said. “They have not attacked anyone.”
Various locals said the hippos seemed peaceful hanging around the village.
“It has become normal to see them around here. It’s like being in Africa. It is a privilege, but when one gets close, it is a bit scary,” housewife Clara Nunez, 48, said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion