Pablo Escobar’s Hippos: A Growing Problem

BBC ^

[nickcarraway]

A herd of hippopotamuses once owned by the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar has been taking over the countryside near his former ranch - and no-one quite knows what to do with them.

It was in 2007, 14 years after Escobar's death, that people in rural Antioquia, 200 miles north-west of Bogota, began phoning the Ministry of Environment to report sightings of a peculiar animal.

"They found a creature in a river that they had never seen before, with small ears and a really big mouth," recalls Carlos Valderrama, from the charity Webconserva.

He went to look, and found himself faced with the task of explaining to startled villagers that this was an animal from Africa. A hippopotamus.

"The fishermen, they were all saying, 'How come there's a hippo here?'" he recalls. "We started asking around and of course they were all coming from Hacienda Napoles. Everything happened because of the whim of a villain."

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He smuggled in elephants, giraffes and other exotic animals, among them four hippos - three females and one male. And with a typically grand gesture, he allowed the public to wander freely around the zoo. Buses filled with schoolchildren passed under a replica of the propeller plane that carried Escobar's first US-bound shipments of cocaine.

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[chrisinoc]

“Hippos, cocaine, AK47s, FARC. It will be like Romancing the Stone without Michael Douglas and with more fun.”

The drug trade have largely left the Colombian Amazon area. You will still see AK47s in Leticia but it is to guard the gemstone trade. It was very peaceful during my stay there.

[Oberon]

Hippos are the most dangerous vertebrates in Africa in terms of numbers of people killed. Insects, as you note, beat them by a fair margin, but are not vertebrates.

[kanawa]