Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria AKA Pablo Escobar, in case you were unaware, wasn’t merely Colombia’s drug trafficker, he was Colombia’s drug lord. When you’re a drug lord you have both time and money.
Theory with the relationship of time and money is such – you generally have, and should have, one or the other. When you have a lot of money, you probably don’t have a lot of time; when you have a lot of time, you generally do not have a lot of money. Trouble happens when you either have a lot – or a little – of both.
Pablo Escobar had a lot of both. The idle mind so to speak which is, according to the world’s most popular book thrusted upon millions, the devil’s workshop. And, to compound this dilemma, Pablo Escobar was a man who was constantly hiding in plain sight. Why? Again, drug lord. Lords, given time and money, can do what they want when they wish.
Therein lied his problem. When you have scads of money but can’t go anywhere since a better part of the world pretty much wants you eradicated, what do you do? You build a palatial estate. A given in my mind. But what do you fill it with? Things you would like to see but can’t. Pablo couldn’t travel without an army of muchachos, low flight pattern and a private landing strip. There’s only so far you can travel in that manner.
Fuck it, he may have claimed, you won’t let me see them in person, then they will come to see me. So, he brought four hippos to put in his own mini-zoo and let them have the run of his 7,000-acre estate, Hacienda Nápoles. He had other animals, but giraffes and camels are apparently easier to control.
A hippo is not even as controllable as Pablo Escobar and he was nowhere near being controllable. Nearly two decades of drugs, money, bribes, women, etcetera is a long run. Pablo, as a drug lord, eventually had his jig come up. No matter how many police and politicians you buy, the end will come sooner or later. For Pablo Escobar, it came with a self-designed “maximum” security prison built for him on property he owned through an agent. This, in a few years, took a turn once the people of Colombia found out the luxurious life he was leading continued in “prison.” They protested, he was scheduled to be sent to a harsher place, escaped via a bribed guard (naturally), then was gunned down in his Medellín hideout the day after his 44th birthday on December 2, 1993.
At this point you may be asking yourself, and you should, “wow what an insane life of crime and excess, but what of the lives of those 4 hippos?”
Colombia’s climate suited the hippos. They loved Escobar’s estate, loved it so much when he had to vacate, they stayed. They couldn’t be caught. Hippos, in case you were unaware, are nasty creatures. They kill more humans in Africa every year than any other animal. Lions? They don’t really want to deal with humans. Elephants? You can see them coming so the ambush is not their strong suit. Hippos? They spend a considerable time underwater (hippopotamus is Greek for ‘river horse’) and do not take your interference with their day-to-day kindly. Hence, they have the capability to surprise and surprise they do.
They certainly surprised the Colombians. They frolicked, and with zero predators to bother them, they took their frolicking to the highest level possible and fornicated with fervor.
4 became 10; 10 became 20.
The government tried to sterilize and neuter them. Not sure how one would go about sterilizing a hippo (neutering I understand and that’s a no-go in my book – too close to the male hippo for my comfort), but it didn’t work.
20 became 40; 40 became… well a crap-ton of Hippos (FYI – hippos pooping is a sight to see and may be considered their superpower). As of right now there are somewhere between 80 to 150 hippos running amok in the jungles of Colombia. Professionals knowledgeable in the world of the hippopotamus, let’s call them ‘hippists’ as it’s fun to say, estimate the unchecked Colombia hippo population could number 1,400 within the next ten years. But that’s an estimate – everything is an estimate for as big as they are it’s hard to count them – remember they’re underwater.
The hippos were underwater; Escobar was under surveillance; and the Colombian people are now under siege by hippos.
Hacienda Napoles Park – what was once Escobar’s estate and is now a theme park (yes, EVERYTHING GETS WEIRDER) – has a good number of hippos; plus, a ton more of them are now running amok using the Magdalena River basin as their home. The Colombian government, without asking the hippos, wishes for them to be on the move. As much as my fertile imagination wants it to be like a circus parade with giddy hippos walking in line looking like those innocent Barnum & Bailey circus cookies, that is not going to happen. The Colombian government, given this “gift” from Señor Escobar, now must deal with them via trapping and shipping. This is when they really could have used Escobar’s help. No one was better at shipping than Pablo.
Sounds harsh, these massive yet poor creatures all comfortable in the swollen marshes of Colombia, but they’ll be shipped off…
… the ones they can catch. Not an easy task. First they must lure them into cages using bait, which they have failed to do numerous times. Not sure what you use to bait a hippo, but in my mind it’s another hippo – one of the opposite sex since fornication seems to be quite the pastime for them. For the time though, the hippos currently run the government, not the other way around. Appropriate since for the better part of two decades Escobar did the same exact thing.
The government is attempting to ship a couple handfuls, AKA 10, to a sanctuary in Mexico. Another 60 are supposedly destined for a place in India. Wait… what? 60 hippos? 60 going to one spot in India? Now I realize India is large (it’s nearly 5 times bigger than Texas), but are the tigers in the northern reaches of the country so desperate for food they are willing to take on an animal they have never seen? Have the 3,500 or so tigers – easier to count as they are very stripey and spend little or no time under water – been consulted about this at all? Or are they just going to drop them into the swift currents of the Ganges and pray no people get eaten? Will they just roam freely like the cows and battle cattle for territory? So many questions.
How is this all going to end? Will the hippos end up taking over the wild lands as well as the government of Colombia? And for the love of spinning hippo tail, how does this article reach its conclusion? With an end… with sound.
Fancy Boys Club 