When night falls in the small Colombian village of Doradal, the quiet is broken by the wet, heavy thuds of the town’s 3,000-pound unofficial mascots trudging past gardens, schoolyards and patios.
Along Colombia’s main river, fishing nets once filled with catfish are coming up emptier — replaced by the wake of churning beasts that shouldn’t be there.
Fishermen are terrified to cast their hooks at night.
“They’ve changed our lifestyle,” said Giovanny Contreras, a fisherman, as he navigated his boat past the bulbous eyes of a male hippo peering at him.
Thousands of miles from their native Africa, hippopotamuses are multiplying in the heart of Colombia, taking over watering holes and wading further into the lives of Colombian communities near the Magdalena River.
It began as a drug lord’s whim: four hippos that Pablo Escobar brought as exotic pets for his sprawling estate in the 1980s. Now an unruly herd has bedeviled Colombia for decades.
After the kingpin was felled in 1993, his 5,000-acre estate fell with him. Left to their own devices in the lush Colombian countryside, the semiaquatic mammals did what they do best: they lolled in the water, grazed and procreated.
Today, about 200 hippos, native to Africa and declared an invasive species in Colombia, are estimated to be roaming freely, drawing fury, affection and global intrigue. Scientists project their numbers to reach more than 1,000 by 2035, a potential threat to Colombia’s ecosystem.
The Colombian government has tried relocating the hippos across the world, but has found few takers. Veterinarians have tried castrating them, but it is a dangerous, herculean effort requiring at least eight people to trap, sedate and operate on each animal.
Then, in April, Colombian officials announced a $2 million plan they had sought to avoid: culling the population by euthanizing 80 hippos, while continuing the effort to relocate the rest.
Under the plan, which could begin this year, hippos that scientists are able to corral would be put down with a lethal chemical injection. Others could be shot between the eyes and buried in place, officials said.
The plan has pitted animal rights groups against conservationists who say the hippos, without natural predators in Colombia, could displace native species. An Indian billionaire stepped in with an offer to give the condemned animals a home in his private wildlife park, but it is unclear if the intercontinental transfer of 80 hippos is feasible.
The planned killing has divided Doradal, home to Mr. Escobar’s former hacienda, where the only population of wild hippos outside Africa has become a lucrative tourism engine and defined the town’s identity.
It has also resurfaced Mr. Escobar’s haunting legacy in a country trying to bury it.
“I’m personally conflicted because I’m conscious that they have to eliminate or move them,” said Samy Castaño, 35, whose house is across from a hippo-filled pond. “But they’re also just animals, animals that aren’t to blame for the decisions of Pablo Escobar,” he added, faulting the Colombian government for failing to take decisive action years ago.
“I don’t want them to kill them!” his 11-year-old daughter, Luciana, chimed in, recounting the time a hippo tried to poke its head through their living room window while she was watching television.
The hippos have long lent a touch of magical realism to daily life in Doradal.
Visitors are greeted by kitschy hippo statues, locals offer hippo-watching tours and some residents have reportedly stolen baby hippos to try to breed them as pets. Many residents regard the beasts with a mix of pride, pity and prudence.
Hippos — the largest land mammals after elephants and rhinos — are notoriously territorial, capable of outrunning humans and have killed people in Africa.
So far, attacks in Colombia have been limited, despite anecdotes of close calls with the animals on their grazing runs at dawn or dusk.
In 2020, a hippo attacked a farmer gathering water from a pond, breaking his ribs and nearly killing him. And in 2023, a driver on a highway slammed into a hippo; the impact killed the hippo but the driver escaped unharmed.
Experts warn it is only a matter of time before people die in such encounters.
“As the invasion of hippos accelerates, there’s going to be higher probabilities of accidents,” said Katherine Corrales, an expert on invasive species who works for the government environmental agency in Boyacá, a region where hippos are proliferating. “There is no invasive animal in the world that is so big.”
A Drug Lord’s Exotic Zoo
Near the height of his power, Mr. Escobar acquired thousands of acres of land in Doradal, which served as a retreat from his billion-dollar empire smuggling cocaine to the United States.
Mr. Escobar dug dozens of man-made lakes and built a Mediterranean-style mansion, a private airstrip and a bullfighting ring. He also smuggled into the country a coterie of exotic animals from zoos and dealers: elephants, giraffes, camels, rhinos, kangaroos, ostriches and deer.
And, of course, four hippos.
“All the animals had their specialized feeders,” said José Conrado Montoya Toro, 85, who said he was hired in the 1980s as a caretaker of Mr. Escobar’s zoo. “When the vegetable truck came, there was cabbage, carrots and lettuce for all the animals.”
The estate, Hacienda Nápoles, fell into disrepair after the police killed Mr. Escobar in a rooftop shootout in Medellín. Most of the animals were transferred to zoos, but the hippos were abandoned and they escaped, reproducing beyond the premises.
Eager to dismantle Mr. Escobar’s mythology, the Colombian government turned Hacienda Nápoles into a privately run theme park with water slides and a zoo that has become a popular tourist destination.
A museum there barely mentions Mr. Escobar’s name. The exhibits focus on the violent history of his Medellín cartel, whose hit men and bombings killed thousands of people.
Visitors can view wild hippos on the former estate’s lakes from an observation deck. And they can feed carrots to the park’s two captives — Paco and Juaco.
“They’re not animals you see every day,” said Henri Samil Perez, a caretaker, as he warned families to keep their children from climbing into the corral. “Having them here is a privilege for us.”
A Bloated Presence on the Magdalena River
Miles from Hacienda Nápoles, dozens of hippos have waded north along the Magdalena, a biodiverse artery that flows about 1,000 miles through Colombia.
Unlike in Africa, there are no lions or crocodiles to curb their growth.
If the hippos continue unabated, many scientists say they could displace manatees and capybaras from their feeding areas. Their paths, scientists say, could alter riverbanks and their excrement the aquatic chemistry, threatening fish.
The government’s first attempt at a solution turned into a political nightmare.
After state-sanctioned hunters shot an especially aggressive male named Pepe in 2009, a leaked photo of smiling soldiers standing over his carcass led to national outrage. A judge soon banned further killings, forcing officials to find nonlethal ways to manage the herd.
The burden largely fell on David Echeverri, a Colombian biologist and local environmental official with a focus on botany who had to learn about hippos on the fly.
His team learned to lure some of them into paddocks with vegetables. Eight were captured and sent to Colombian zoos. Dozens were tranquilized and castrated to keep them from reproducing, a grueling six-to-eight hour nighttime undertaking.
“The most complicated part is capturing the hippos,” Mr. Echeverri said. “We weren’t able to stop population growth.”
In 2021, a group of scientists published an exhaustive study concluding that culling them was one of the most effective ways to protect the ecosystem. And in 2022, the Colombian government declared the hippos an invasive species, opening the door to euthanasia.
Mr. Contreras, the fisherman, 48, is eager for the cull to begin.
He has largely abandoned the river after dark, forfeiting what used to be his most abundant hauls. With their massive bodies submerged, the hippos are invisible in the moonlight.
Fishermen are terrified of unknowingly navigating over their sunken boulders of muscle or, worse, provoking one and turning it into a territorial bull. A hippo can destroy a boat hull with a toss of its head.
“Instead of thinking so much about the lives of the animals,” he said, “why don’t they think about the suffering of the fishermen and the poor who live on the river’s edge?”
