Colombia Must Pay $3.5M To Transfer Pablo Escobar's 'Cocaine Hippos'

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By Ronnie Reyes

March 30, 2023 | 6:22 p.m

The Colombian government is ready to spend $3.5 million to evacuate about half of Pablo Escobar’s invasive “cocaine hippos.”

Colombian officials said they were dealing with about 150 hippos, all descendants of a man and three women, that the late drug lord smuggled into the country in the 1980s.

With no natural predators, the hypersexual, three-ton herbivores have spread beyond Escobar’s 7,000-acre Hacienda Napoles property, nestled between Medellin and Bogota along the Magdalena River.

Authorities have now drawn up plans to capture 70 of the hippos and send 10 to the Ostok Sanctuary in Mexico and the other 60 to the Greens Zoological Rescue & Rehabilitation Kingdom in Gujarat, India.

“The entire operation was expected to cost around $3.5 million,” Ernesto Zazueta, owner of Ostok Sanctuary, said in a statement.

Colombia expects to pay $3.5m to transfer Pablo Escobar’s ‘cocaine hippos’ Luis Bernardo Cano/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Anibel Gaviria, the governor of the Colombian region where the hippos live, said the plan is to use bait to lure the animals into enclosures where they will be locked in special boxes.

The animals would be flown from Rionegro Airport to Mexico and India where sanctuaries and zoos would be able to care for them.

Despite the huge cost of moving them, government officials said they wanted to humanely release the hippos rather than kill them after calls for culling last year.

The hippos were officially declared an invasive species in 2022 after Colombia’s Environment Ministry warned that the animals’ large amount of urine and feces could pollute rivers and threaten the country’s native manatees and capybaras.

According to local reports, the hippos are also known to occasionally run into towns and clog traffic.

All 150 hippos are descended from one male and three females that Escobar smuggled in. AFP via Getty Images

In 2021, the Colombian government began sterilizing the horny, horny hippos to keep their numbers down, but the animals, untreated with chemicals to render them infertile, continued to produce calves at an alarming rate.

According to National Geographic, the hippopotamus has a gestation period of eight months and gives birth to a calf every two years.

While Colombia is working to keep the hippo population down, other countries including Ecuador, the Philippines and Botswana have also expressed interest in hosting the troublesome hippos.

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