Pablo Escobar was a complex character, a billionaire criminal who craved respectability and acceptance from Colombia’s elite while cultivating a Robin Hood image with Colombia’s poor. He was ruthless and incredibly capable. He built a fortune of approximately $70 billion dollars (in today’s money) over a fifteen-year period from the creation of the Medelin cartel in 1976. His life and times have been chronicled in series like Narcos, he appears a character in numerous films that deal with the Cocaine trade and its impact on politics and society in South America and beyond. His death did very little to change the demand for the product in affluent societies or the supply coming from the South American continent. Both have continued to grow in the decades since his death.
Escobar at his peak was incredibly powerful and represented a significant threat to Colombian democracy. He became famous for giving people he was looking to corrupt the choice between lead or silver, either take the money you are being offered or take a bullet. His crimes include committing numerous terrorist acts, bombing a well-known school wares shopping area the day before schools resumed, killing Supreme Court Judges and Justice Ministers as well as a number of other Colombian politicians. His fatal mistake was to overreach by blowing up the Avianca Flight 203. He had hoped to assassinate a presidential candidate called César Gaviria; Gaviria missed the flight, but the bombing went ahead anyway. The unwitting bomber thought he was going to be recording another passenger’s conversations when he flicked the switch that killed himself and everyone else on board. The killing of 2 American citizens on the flight meant that the Bush administration in the US finally roused itself and started to directly address Escobar and his cartel. Escobar subsequently surrender to a plea deal to 5 years in a luxury self-built prison in 1991. However, he continued to run his drug operations from prison. The government saw this continued running of his drug operations from prison as a breach of their agreement and decided to move him into a normal prison. Escobar got wind of this and he famously went on the run in July 1992, finally being caught and killed in a shoot out in December 1993. Colombian society survived him, it is incredibly resilient. Is some ways Escobar was just another member of the cast of the long running low level civil war which had been ongoing in Colombia since 1948, with armed militia on both sides committing atrocities. A peace deal was finally agreed between the two sides in 2016 which largely holds today.
Bizarrely Escobar’s most lasting legacy in Colombia is his role in the introduction of a fairly large and obvious invasive species, or to put it another way an unwitting act of ecoterrorism. As he accumulated wealth Escobar decided to build a zoo at his ranch the Hacienda Nápoles. At the time every self-respecting drug lord had his own menagerie. So Escobar imported a variety of exotic animals, his zoo had elephants, ostriches, kangaroos, giraffes and hippopotamuses as well as a number of large concrete statues of dinosaurs. When Escobar was killed his family fought the government for ownership of the property, which became somewhat neglected after Escobar’s death. After 5 years in 1998, the government won the right to seize the property in the courts. As part of this process, they transferred most of the remaining animals to domestic zoos, but several Hippos – most sources say three females and one male – were considered too dangerous to move. Hippos are notoriously cranky and they kill an estimated 500 people annually in Africa, and the true number could be a multiple of that figure. For comparison Sharks kill on average about 15 people globally each year. Falling coconuts kill 150 people annually so suffice to say Sharks get a very very bad rep for the number of people they actually kill. At any rate, a decision was made that certain animals were too dangerous to approach and an initial herd of approximately 4 animals was left untended in the environs of the estate.
This decision to leave 4 animals in the wild is ultimately where the story starts of what are called the Cocaine Hippos by the locals. Ultimately the animals had to fend for themselves, in the 10 years following Escobar’s death the herd was though to be close to 20 animals and they had entered the local rivers systems and were beginning to come into conflict with local fishermen and attacking boats. To date there have been no fatalities in Colombia, in the wild Hippos live for 40-50 years on average, it seems safe to assume the original escapees dominate the herd currently, but as those Hippos who remember living with humans die out they will be replaced by truly wild animals with no memory of living with humans.
By 2008 the wild population was estimated to be about 25 Hippos and the Colombian Ministry of the Environment decided that it was time to do something about this invasive species, in 2009 they hired a hunter and began a cull. Then something bizarre happened, a photo showing a culled male Hippo – about 60 miles from Escobar’s ranch – was published. Pro Hippo protests broke out in a society that at the time was still losing about 1000 people a year to a civil war. Public outrage ensured that the cull stopped. The Hippos blissfully unaware of the fuss they were creating continued to breed in what was essentially a predator free environment.
Colombia’s problem now is that the Hippos very much went forth and multiplied. Females reach sexual maturity at between 5 and 6 years of age and can rear a calf every 18 months. In common with other territorial animals, young adult males are expelled from the herd by the dominant male and must find new territory for themselves. Once they established a breeding population they started to expand in the Magdalena River basin. Today nobody knows for sure how many Hippos inhabit the rivers and lakes of the Magdalena Basin, which is also home to two-thirds of Colombia’s human population. As of late 2023, the official government count was 169, which many consider to be a conservative estimate. The view of researchers on the ground is that if left unchecked the population could hit 1400 by 2040. They are competing for space and territory with native animals like the Capybara, Giant Otter and Manatee.
In October 2021 the Colombian Government started a programme of chemical castration, which was challenged in the courts by animal rights activists. Then in 2023 the Colombian Environment Minister, Susana Muhamad, announced a three-pronged plan to manage the invasive Hippo population. The first strategy is surgical sterilisation in the wild of around 40 hippos a year, this is a complex & challenging procedure as a male Hippo typically retracts his testes inside his body, often up to 40cm deep. The second strategy is capture and relocation and the third strategy is a limited cull. The jury is still very much out on whether this plan will prove to be a success.
Experience elsewhere in the world suggests that with any invasive species, it is very hard to put the genie back into the bottle once a species establishes a breeding population in the wild. It is now more likely than not that Colombia will have a permanent Hippo population.
The population will essentially be a separate sub species and it will need a Linnean classification. Hippopotamus Amphibius Escobari possibly?