'Cocaine Hippos': How one drug lord's private zoo is destroying one South American nation's ecosystem
Fox News correspondent Griff Jenkins offers an inside scoop into the drug-laced history of hippopotamuses in Colombia as the population has grown exponentially since the 1980s and devastated the country's ecosystem.
While you've probably heard of "Cocaine Bear," you probably haven't heard of the "cocaine hippos" wreaking havoc on one South American nation's ecosystem 40 years after their owner, drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, brought them in from Africa.
The drug-laced history of how the species came to face a cull in Colombia first began in the 1980s, when Escobar, the "King of Cocaine," forged his own private zoo of exotic animals at his sprawling estate, illegally importing kangaroos, zebras, hippos and others.
What was once a measly four hippos has now climbed to almost 200 in the decades since, according to reports, leaving the country to grapple with how to get the population under control and preserve the environment.
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Fox News correspondent Griff Jenkins, exploring the unchecked catastrophe in Fox Nation's "The Drug Lord's Hippos," traveled six hours to Bogota to the banks of the Magdalena River, the nation's largest river that now serves as a "hippo superhighway."
Colombia's Environment Minister Susana Muhamad looks on during a press conference to announce that some of the 166 hippopotamuses belonging to slain cocaine baron Pablo Escobar will be euthanized, in Bogota on November 2, 2023. (JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images)
"They're very, very dangerous. The hippos have started to attack people," one local told Jenkins.
Others branded the creatures as "unpredictable" and "aggressive," saying the best practice, if encountering one, is to simply hide.
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Colombian environmental minister Susana Muhamad, in a statement, said, "We are in a race against time in terms of permanent environmental and ecosystem impacts," per a recent article from The New York Times.
Drug trafficker Pablo Escobar (right), patron of the Medellin cartel, and his wife Maria Victoria (left) in 1983, in Colombia (translated from Spanish). (Eric VANDEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Local veterinarians find themselves in this "race against time" to figure out how to curb the population, including a very involved surgical sterilization process that, when dealing with aggressive, multi-ton creatures, is especially challenging.
The Colombian government, meanwhile, has pledged millions to combat the problem as the hippos rival native species for resources and pollute the waterways with feces that could alter the water and pose a dangerous change for native inhabitants.
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Colombia's hippo problem led the government to release a plan to curb the species' population. (Fox Nation)
Aside from sterilization, the plan could also include relocation and euthanization, according to a website laying out the plan.
"It could not be said that a single strategy is effective for our objective, which is to control the population. We seek to implement this plan in the shortest possible time, precisely so that the impacts cease," Muhamad said, translated from Spanish.
To learn more about the catastrophic development devastating Colombia's environment, sign up for Fox Nation and begin streaming "The Drug Lord's Hippos" today.
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