Colombia on Wednesday said it was making progress transferring 70 hippos to overseas sanctuaries, but mitigating the chaos caused by this unusual legacy from the late drug lord Pablo Escobar comes with a hefty price tag: US$3.5 million -Dollar.
The cocaine baron brought small numbers of the African beasts to Colombia in the late 1980s. But after his death in 1993, the so-called “cocaine hippos” were left free to roam in a hot, swampy area of the department of Antioquia, where environmental authorities have been helpless to contain their numbers, which now stand at about 150 animals.
Authorities said they plan to capture and move nearly half of the hippos in the coming months, with 10 destined for the Ostok sanctuary in northern Mexico and 60 for a yet-unnamed facility in India.
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“The entire operation was expected to cost around $3.5 million,” Ernesto Zazueta, owner of Ostok Sanctuary, told reporters.
Hippos swim in the lake at Hacienda Napoles Park, once the private estate of drug lord Pablo Escobar, who imported three female hippos and one male hippo decades ago in Puerto Triunfo, Colombia, in this February 4, 2021 file photo. Fernando Vergara/AP
He and Governor Anibel Gaviria, from the Colombian region where the hippos live, plan to lure the animals into enclosures with bait, where they will remain confined before being placed in special crates for transfer.
Colombia had attempted a sterilization program to control the population, but it failed.
The Environment Ministry last year declared hippos an invasive species, opening the door to eventual culling.
But the Hippo transfer plan is considered a life-saving measure.
Independent journalist Audrey Huse, who has lived in Colombia for eight years, told CBS News last week that Escobar imported just four hippos in the 1980s — and now there are nearly 150 of them.
“Because they don’t have natural enemies here like they do in Africa, the population is booming and affecting the local ecosystem,” Huse said. “Because they are such large animals, they consume significant amounts of grassland and produce significant waste, which then poisons rivers.”
The result is that the hippos end up killing fish and threatening endemic species like manatees, otters and turtles, she said.
In 2021, after the Colombian government was sued over its plan to sterilize or kill the animals, a federal court ruled that the hippos can be recognized as humans or “interested persons” with legal rights in the U.S. Weight in Colombia, where the hippos live, said a legal expert.
The area they roam is a haven for the animals, which lack predators and have plentiful food and water, CBS News correspondent Manuel Bojorquez reported in 2019. Locals call them the “pets of the village,” but a local one Biologist Bojorquez said the “dangerous” and “territorial” species are anything but.
Last year Alvaro Molina, 57, said he supported the hippos – despite being one of the few Colombians to have been attacked by one. One day he was fishing when he felt movement under his canoe, throwing him into the water.
“The female attacked me once – the first pair to arrive – because she had recently given birth,” he said.
Locals say that the hippos sometimes come out of the water and run through the city streets. When that happens, traffic stops and people avoid them.
Pablo Escobar’s hippos keep breeding and Colombia doesn’t know how to stop it