FEATURE - Hippos roam Colombian drug lord's abandoned ranch
Date: 24-Jan-03
Country: COLOMBIA
Author: Ibon Villelabeitia
The hippos are all that remain of Escobar's private zoo. In his heyday in the 1980s, Escobar imported elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, giraffes and other exotic beasts to his lavish ranch at Puerto Triunfo, 100 miles (160 km) north of Bogota in central Colombia, as a testament to his fabulous wealth.
Most of the animals were confiscated by the authorities and transferred to zoos after the cocaine lord was gunned down by police in 1993 in Medellin. But the hippos were left behind.
Despite the absence of a keeper, the Nile hippos - some of which weigh 2 tonnes - have flourished and reproduced on a muddy lake near the Magdalena River as if it were their natural terrain. And for six of the hippos born there, it is.
"I've never heard of anything like this in my life," Steve Thompson, a hippo expert at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, said in a telephone interview. He has traveled to Botswana, Kenya and Tanzania to study the behavior and life of hippos.
"I've only seen hippos living in the wild in Africa but I guess that if they have the right food and the right water habitat they can do pretty well in Colombia."
The short-legged, hairless mammals share the estate with a few families of war refugees. The refugees fled their homes after leftist rebels attacked their villages and took up residence at Escobar's ranch. They live in the once-luxurious guest homes which stand decaying under the tropical sun. Hens strut beneath laundry lines hung with ragged clothing.
A dozen refugee children play in the grounds all day, and the hippos watch them from the lake. Only the tops of the hippos' massive, reddish-brown heads and their constantly twitching ears show above the water. If the children come too close to the shore, the hippos snort and bluster and open their jaws menacingly, or make a rolling dive, to scare them away.
Nile hippos are plant-eaters, have a life expectancy of up to 40 years and can weigh up to 4.5 tonnes, Thompson said.
At nightfall, the hippo herd leaves the lake and wanders about the ranch, grazing on the grassy slopes and making sorties to the stables, where they savor the salt lick, a large block of salt for farm animals.
The refugees, unfamiliar with the ways of the giant African herbivores, have tried repeatedly to fence them in with barbed wire to thwart their raids on the salt lick and keep them from upsetting the cows. But to a hippo, a barbed-wire fence is an annoyance, not an obstacle.
"They tear down the fence every time I put it up and turn everything into a mess. But what can I do? They are huge," said Luis Perea, 64, pointing frantically at a flattened barbed-wire fence crossed by a trail of hippo tracks the size and shape of dinner plates.
NOAH'S ARKS
The 7,400-acre (3,000 hectare) Hacienda Napoles, in Antioquia province, became the symbol of Escobar's billion-dollar empire and of his extravagant lifestyle - a place of wonders, wild parties and debauchery.
Escobar built an airport, artificial lakes, swimming pools, a bull-ring, a garden with 100,000 fruit trees and towering cement dinosaurs. He assembled his menagerie to entertain guests, who included politicians, judges, soccer stars and beauty queens.
The zoo, which offered free bus tours to the public, had hundreds of exotic and rare animals from every corner of the world - from black swans to Arabian camels to flamingos.
"The Godfather," as Escobar was nicknamed, purchased and imported the animals without bothering to get any permits and chartered ships to bring them home from Africa and Asia.
"I saw the hippopotamuses, the giraffes, the zebras, the lions enter the ranch on trucks," said Marcos, a 24-year-old taxi driver who sold lollipops at the gates of the ranch when he was a child. "This was paradise on earth."
All that is left of the zoo is a rusty, pocked sign that reads: "Welcome to Napoles Zoological Nature Park." For a while, there were some leftover zebras, but the last one grew old and senile and
