Colombia Spends $3.5 Million On Deporting Pablo Escobar’s Hippos As Population Surges

Colombia has announced that it is transferring 70 hippopotamuses to overseas sanctuaries in an attempt to contain its growing population. These hippos belonged to the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar, who illegally imported four hippos to Colombia from Africa in the 1980s. Escobar’s story was shown in the Netflix series Narcos.

After the cocaine baron was fatally shot by Colombian police in 1993, the animals were abandoned and left to roam freely in an area of Antioquia, where Escobar’s Hacienda Napoles estate was located. With the hippos reproducing in nearby rivers and spreading to towns nearby, environmental authorities failed to curb their number, which risks upsetting the local ecosystem.

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There are now 130 hippopotamuses in the area, and the Colombian authorities plan to catch almost half over the next few months and plan to transfer 10 of them to the Ostok Sanctuary in northern Mexico, and 60 to a yet-to-be-named facility in India. The Ostok Sanctuary’s owner, Ernesto Zazueta, estimated the total cost of the operation to be $3.5 million.

The Colombian government agency responsible for the relocation of the animals believes the operation with time-consuming. Each hippo will be professionally anesthetized before being transported.

Colombia unsuccessfully attempted to stunt the population growth by sterilizing some of the hippos in 2021. They hope that now that they are taking a more extreme measure that they will obtain better results.