Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Drug Lord Hippos

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

Pablo Escobar was the biggest drug lord the world has ever known. At the height of his power, he had a near-monopoly on cocaine trade in the United States. He had a peak inflation-adjusted net worth of $60 billion dollars. He was personally responsible for thousands of murders and dozens of acts of terrorism in Colombia. Today in Colombia, there are approximately 100 hippopotamuses roaming wild. What do these two things have to do with each other? Well, everything. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pablo Escobar was the biggest drug lord the world has ever known. At the height of his power, he had a near monopoly on the cocaine trade in the United States. He had a peak inflation-indjusted net worth of $60 billion. He was personally responsible for thousands of murders and dozens of acts of terrorism in Colombia. Today in Colombia, there are approximately 100 hippopotamuses rumming wild. What do these two things have to do with each other? Well, everything. Learn more about the cocaine hippopotamus.

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by G Adventures. These are very troubled times.

Even though things are starting to get better and more countries are opening up, people are still hesitant to travel, and that is totally understandable. That is why Gadventures has announced its new Travel with Confidence Plus Collection. The Travel with Confidence Plus Collection are 37 tours in 27 countries that have increased safety and sanitation protocols to protect you and other travelers. These tours will have smaller group sizes, private transportation, and cheaper options to get your own room, as well as more personal space. G-Adventures has also earned the World Travel and Tourism Council's Safe Travel Stamp for their health and hygiene protocols and has implemented the Adventure Travel Trade Association's COVID-19 Health and Safety Guidelines. The Travel with Confidence tours are available for booking today and will be departing from October 2, 2020 to the end of 2021. For more information and to book your tour, click on the link in the show notes. Pablo Escobar is the most well-known and notorious drug lord and narco-terrorist in the world, even though he's been dead for the time.

almost 30 years. His organization, the Medellin cartel, was founded and led by him, and at its peak, he became the wealthiest criminal in world history. His empire was built on a foundation of violence and bloodshed. He was responsible for a 1989 truck bombing in Bogota, which killed 63 people and injured over 1,000. He was behind the bombing on Avianca Flight 203, which killed 110 people. It is estimated that during his reign of terror, he was responsible for the deaths of over 4,000 people, including 200 judges, 1,000 police, and numerous journalists, government officials, and innocent bystanders. At its peak, the Medellin cartel was responsible for over 80% of the cocaine smuggled into the United States. He was so wealthy that once when he and his family weren't hiding, his daughter got sick, and to keep her warm,

he literally burned $2 million in cash. In 1991, he surrendered to authorities under the condition that he could build his own prison, built to his specifications and hire his own guards who are loyal to him. Wasn't a prison so much as a fortress to protect him from his enemies. As darkly fascinating a character as Pablo Escobar is, this episode really isn't about him. This episode is about the private zoo he created on his 3,600-acre estate called Asienda Nopolis. On his sprawling property, he had, as all megalomaniacal leaders do, a collection of animals. Not just any animals, but animals which were.

brought from all over the world. In a zoo were rhinoceruses, giraffes, zebras, ostriches, and four hippopotamuses. After Escobar's death in 1993, all of the animals were moved or sold to other zoos or parks, except for the hippos. The hippos were considered too large and difficult to move, so they were left in place and forgotten. The hippos, however, got along quite nicely in this tropical and wet part of Columbia. In fact, the four original hippos are now, 27 years later, 100 hippos. Some experts estimate that within 10 to 20 years, there could be thousands of them. These hundred hippos have become the center of a huge controversy. In the vast majority of cases, invasive species are usually a bad thing. They did not evolve in the environment, so predator prey balances don't exist. In the specific case of the hippos, they feed in

the evenings on land, and then during the day they go into the water to cool off where they defecate, bringing in nutrients. This can cause algae blooms, which can kill off other species in the water, by preventing the availability of oxygen or other nutrients. There is also the danger which the hippos themselves possess. In Africa, hippos are responsible for more deaths every year than any other animal. So far, no one has been harmed or killed by the hippos in Colombia, but the risk is there and will increase as the population rises. However, there's another side to the story. Ecologists are not universal in their condemnation of the hippos, and neither are the people of the region who live with them. For starters, the hippos have become a popular tourist attraction, which bring in much-needed

money. Just being hippos themselves is enough to bring in people, but having a lineage which extends to Pablo Escobar makes them extra special. The ecological argument is much more complex than it might first appear. In a project funded by the National Geographic Society, researchers compared Colombian lakes with hippos versus lakes without hippos. The study was comprehensive looking at the total diversity around the lakes, down to the microbes found in the lake water itself. The researchers found there were subtle differences between the lakes, but the differences weren't major. One of the major arguments in favor of the hippos comes from the concept of rewilding. The idea stems from the fact that about 11,000 years ago, large herbivores were much more common in the

area. They were removed from the ecosystem when humans migrated there and hunted them to extinction. Most of the assumptions which are made about the ecosystem assume that, that the way it is now is the way it's supposed to be. There was a creature known as the Nodoungalit, which was a large semi-aquatic herbivore which lived in the region. The hippos today are filling a very similar role in the ecosystem to what the Nodongolids would have held. There have been other cases around the world where the reintroduction of large herbivores have had positive effects on grasslands. Several researchers think that the accidental introduction of hippos to Colombia might actually be a good thing in that the hippos are filling an ecological

niche which has been missing for thousands of years. There doesn't appear to be any immediate need to take action. Whatever the impact the hippos have at this point seems to be minor either way, and because the hippos are so large and their numbers are so small, they will be easy to find should the decision ever be made to remove them. Until then, if you live in the Western Hemisphere, your best opportunity to see hippos in the wild will beat ahead to Porto Triunfo, Colombia, to view the animals which were brought there by the world's biggest drug lord, Pablo Escobar. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackala. Special thanks to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon.

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