Sandra Boynton is an American illustrator best known for her book Hippos Go Berserk; published in 1977, it was wildly successful, in part because Boynton's beady-eyed behemoths are so recognizable. Rendered with only a few simple lines, for forty plus years her hippos have graced calendars and coffee mugs, T-shirts and totes, and they're still loved today by kids eight to eighty.
Real hippos, however, are far less lovable and can even be quite aggressive, at times. In Africa, they kill an estimated 500 people a year. And that’s on their turf, where living conditions are hippo-optimal.
Just think how cranky hippos might be, accustomed as they are to quiet crocodiles and placid giraffes, if they somehow turned up in South America, amongst squawking parrots and howler monkeys.
There are, in fact, a fair number of hippos who call South America home. These relocated residents live in a town called Doradal, roughly one hundred miles from Medellin, Colombia. They bathe and they splash in the coffee-colored waters of the Magdalena River, courtesy of Pablo “El Patron” Escobar.
From the late seventies on to the early nineties, if you tooted even the smallest toot of cocaine, no doubt you had Pablo Escobar to thank, and as nouveau riche drug lords and kingpins will, on his estate, the head of the Medellin drug cartel kept a private collection of exotic animals, such as ostriches, elephants, zebras, giraffes, and last but not least, the aforementioned hippos.
In 1930, on Thanksgiving Day, mob boss Al Capone set up a soup kitchen that served more than 5,000 people. Not out of the goodness of his heart, you understand. Capone simply recognized how crucial image-management was and could be.
El Patron recognized it as well, and opened his menagerie to the general public. In Doradal, people lined up outside Escobar’s hacienda, stood hours on end in the Colombian sun and thought it was cute when the great “river horses” opened their massive jaws wide in what looked to the gathered like big, sleepy yawns.
Yes. Cute. Like Boynton’s creations. Except these weren't cartoons, and those aren't really "yawns." It's a hippo behavior. It says they mean business.
In 1993, after Pablo Escobar was shot and killed by Colombian police, the animals were farmed out to various zoos, except for four hippos too dangerous to move; three females and one male were left in Doradal where they made little hippos until by last count, in 2023, the conservative estimate was 169.
Unfortunately, though, their presence poses a threat to the region’s ecosystem. While Colombia is a land of great bio-diversity, conditions have not evolved to support the life of a mega-herbivore, which can span a good forty to fifty years.
In 2007 the Colombian government turned part of Escobar's estate into a safari park and zoo. Some of the original hippos from Doradal are there. They spend their days eating spinach-like greens that visitors buy from concession stands.
In Doradal's outlying areas, however, the hippos seem to be going berserk. Crops have been destroyed, and cattle attacked. Some folks propose euthanasia programs. Others who take a more pro-hippo stance say that as the earth's stewards, we are their caretakers; the hippos, after all, didn't ask to be there.
Either way, for Colombians, feelings run deep where the hippos are concerned, and for Pablo himself, they run deeper still. His villa is now a memorial museum, to honor those lost to his whim or his will.
But inside a gift shop a mile down the road, his face graces coffee mugs, calendars, T-shirts and totes. They sell replica pistols just like El Patron's.
He was loved by a few, hated by many. A self-made man and one who was feared; wildly successful and so recognizable. In death, he could live a good forty or fifty more years.
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Source: Hammer, Joshua. “The Strange Afterlife of Pablo Escobar’s Hippos”. Smithsonian Magazine. 2024, July-August, pp. 100-114.