Colombian drug lord is dead, but his hippos thrive

PUERTO TRIUNFO, Colombia — Hacienda Napoles was Pablo Escobar's pleasure palace, a 5,500-acre estate where the drug lord held court over million-dollar cocaine deals, parties with underage girls and visits by shadowy men.

Escobar lived large in Puerto Triunfo, his lush fiefdom 100 miles east of Medellín, far from the teeming slums where he began his life of crime. He built a bullring, an airstrip, an ersatz Jurassic Park with six immense concrete dinosaurs. He stocked a private wild-animal park with hundreds of elephants, camels, giraffes, ostriches, zebras and other animals. He installed four hippos in one of the estate's 12 man-made lakes.

Today, Hacienda Napoles is in ruins, taken over by jungle foliage and bats. Escobar is long gone, cut down in a hail of police gunfire.

But the hippos remain.

More than 15 years after the government took control of Hacienda Napoles, the elephants, giraffes and zebras have long since disappeared, given away to Colombian zoos or left to die.

But the hippos were never claimed because they were too large and ornery to move. The original four have multiplied to 16 and, far from starving to death, as some expected, they have learned to forage like cows.

Three months ago, a male hippo was fatally shot by ranchers after he wandered three miles from the rest of the herd to a neighboring stream.

Among themselves, hippopotamuses, whose name means "river horse," are gregarious animals, living in herds of up to 40 in their natural habitat: the rivers, lakes and swamps of a dozen African countries. They live up to 50 years, and the males grow to a hefty size, sometimes 12 feet long and five feet high. They vie with the rhinoceros for the title of second-largest land animal after the elephant.

They spend most of their lives submerged in water to prevent sunburn. As hulking as they are, hippos can outrun humans on land.

That speed and their aggressive disposition whenever their turf is invaded make them a safety threat and the main reasons authorities are offering the animals, or at least most of them, free to anyone who will take them. No one has accepted, mainly because of the cost and bother of transporting the beasts.

The local government has begun to float the possibility it might have to reduce or eliminate the herd by extermination, an idea that probably will not sit well with the locals, many of whom regard the animals as part of their identity.

The issue of what to do with the hippos has come to a head because after years of ownership disputes, the state prevailed against the drug lord's wife and three children, who claimed the estate by inheritance.

The Colombian government plans a 2,000-inmate, medium-security prison on one 800-acre chunk of Hacienda Napoles, and several hundred acres more are being set aside as a environmental reserve.

The Puerto Triunfo municipality wants to make improvements to attract more than the 100 or so tourists who show up each month. The plan includes turning the lake occupied by the hippos into an aquatic park and keep a few hippos.

Restaurant owner Leonel Villegas said the hippos should be left alone and the local government should invest in "making it even better for tourists. But don't just give them away."