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The strange tale of Pablo Escobar and his roaming river monsters – hippopotami

The strange tale of Pablo Escobar and his roaming river monsters – hippopotami

This is a story about an escape from the secret Colombian jungle ranch of the infamous narco-baron Pablo Escobar. But the escapees were not exactly prisoners; it happened after Escobar had been gunned down and his hideout had fallen to pieces. The result of the escape, however, could have huge environmental implications. It involves four hippos. By DON PINNOCK.

For some reason, between building a mansion called Hacienda Napoles, engaging in cocaine wars, partying with underage girls and fighting the national army, Escobar acquired a taste for prehistoric monsters and old cars. He built a herd of huge, gaudy concrete dinosaurs, including pair of psychedelic tyrannosaurus chicks bursting out of eggs while their mother did battle with a concrete triceratops. Among his many vintage cars was, appropriately, Al Capone’s gangster-mobile.

But he also had a passion­ for African animals and constructed a private zoo. To stock it, he imported a small herd of zebras, several elephants and giraffes, a lone ostrich and four hippos.

In 1993 Escobar was tracked down to what he thought was a safe house in Medellin and riddled with bullets. After El Patrón’s downfall, his mansion and grounds were heavily looted and the dinosaurs smashed by people hoping to find hidden gold bullion.

The ranch decayed and the animals were dispatched to zoos. But nobody could figure out what to do with the hippos. Who wanted a pod of fierce, fat pachyderms? So they stayed in their soupy lake, grazed the evergreen grass on the banks and lazed and grunted undisturbed for many years. But, as we know, at night hippos are far from lazy.

Without power, the zoo’s electric fence shut down and it didn’t take much to shove it over. In 2007, 14 years after Escobar’s death, people in rural Antioquia began phoning the Colombian Ministry of Environment to report sightings of peculiar animals in the Magdalena River. Carlos Valderrama, a vet from the charity Webconserva, went to have a look and declared them to be hippos – rather a lot of them.

magdalena-river-waterway

Photo: Magdalena River, Colombia (Photo by Joz3)

“The fishermen, they were all saying, ‘How come there’s a hippo here?’” he recalled. “We started asking around and of course they were all coming from Hacienda Napoles.”

There is considerable doubt about numbers of descendants from the original four. When the estate was abandoned there were 18 in the home pool – 14 years later estimates were running to 65 in the surrounding river system. But as anyone who’s visited an African game reserve knows, there are always more in the pool than you imagine. At night the animals roam the countryside, wandering into ranches and eating crops. Valderrama has spotted hippos 250 kilometres from the ranch.

The problem is that Colombia is idyllic hippo country: its rivers are shallow, slow-moving, flow all year round and, as Escobar appreciated, there’s deep jungle into which to disappear.

Just how much they like the country can be judged from the sex they’re having. In Africa, hippos usually become sexually active between the ages of seven and nine for males and nine and 11 for females, but Escobar’s hippos are becoming active as young as three.

All the fertile females are reported to be giving birth to a calf every year. Unlike in Africa, there’s no natural brake on the size of the population. So their genes have clearly put out the meassage: go forth and conquer Colombia.

Just what to do about them has become a vexing problem. Hippos can be dangerous and, back home, they kill more people than any other mammal, though there are no reports of fatalities from Escobar’s beasts.

Local fishermen, though, are worried and there have been calls to castrate the males [Ed – rather you than me], shoot them all or relocate them to zoos. Fencing an area large enough to contain them would cost more than half a million dollars and Colombia is a poor country.

An Amazonian biologist, worried about the ecosystem, suggested they should be barbecued and eaten. San Diego University ecologist Rebecca Lewison considered the problem as a crazy wildlife experiment. The World Wildlife Fund declared it an ecological time bomb. But any solutions are countered by what Valderrama calls Colombia’s ‘floppy effect.’ Hippos are seen as either charismatic animals or cute and cuddly toys. Rural children have adopted newborn hippos and feed them milk from baby bottles and carrots. When a marauding bull was shot by a professional hunter, a photograph of him posing next to the body caused a national outcry.

The mixed feelings about hippos reflects the way Colombians regard Escobar. Though thousands of people died at the hands of his Medellin Cartel, thousands more were helped in lavish displays of largesse. What to do about his hippos has become tied up with his legacy and that, to say the least, is conflicted.

“Whatever decision the government makes will be controversial and invoke popular backlash,” says Valderrama. “When we managed to castrate one there were people saying: ‘Why do you have to castrate them? Just let them be. Castrate the politicians.’” DM

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