The rivers of Colombia move slowly in the heat.

They curl through green valleys and low, humid plains, carrying reeds, reflections, and the heavy silence of afternoon. Along the banks of the Magdalena River, life gathers in familiar rhythms—fishermen casting nets into brown water, birds stepping through marsh grass, the low hum of insects beneath broad leaves. And sometimes, breaking the stillness, comes the sound of something large entering the water.

A splash. A ripple. A reminder.

Here, in a country where memory often lingers in strange forms, the ghosts of old empires do not always disappear. Sometimes they graze in the grass. Sometimes they wade through the shallows.

This week, the story of Colombia’s so-called “cocaine hippos” turned again.

Anant Ambani, the son of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, has offered to provide a home for 80 of the invasive hippopotamuses descended from animals once imported by drug lord Pablo Escobar. The proposal comes just weeks after the Colombian government authorized the euthanasia of part of the growing population, citing ecological damage, danger to local communities, and the failure of previous efforts to control their numbers.

The animals have become both spectacle and burden.

Escobar brought four hippos to his private estate in the 1980s, part of the extravagant menagerie at Hacienda Nápoles. After his death in 1993, the animals were left behind. In the warm wetlands of central Colombia, without natural predators and with abundant food, they multiplied. Today, their number is estimated at nearly 200.

They roam riverbanks and farmland now, moving with ancient certainty through a landscape not built for them.

Scientists and environmental officials say the hippos are disrupting fragile ecosystems—consuming vast amounts of vegetation, altering water chemistry with their waste, crowding out native species such as manatees and capybaras, and posing threats to people living nearby. Hippos are among the world’s most dangerous large animals, and there have been reports of attacks on fishermen and residents in the region.

Colombia has tried gentler paths.

Sterilization programs were launched. Some animals were relocated to zoos or sanctuaries abroad. But the process proved expensive, slow, and logistically difficult. Capturing and transporting a multi-ton animal through marshland is a task measured in helicopters, cranes, sedation teams, and risk.

So the country turned toward harder decisions.

Authorities announced plans to euthanize 80 hippos in an attempt to slow population growth and limit environmental damage. The decision has divided conservationists, residents, and animal welfare advocates—some arguing that ecological preservation leaves few alternatives, others insisting the animals are victims of human vanity and should not pay the final cost.

Into this uneasy conversation stepped Ambani.

He has formally requested that the Colombian government pause the cull and instead allow the hippos to be moved to Vantara, his vast wildlife rescue and conservation center in Gujarat. The proposal includes a veterinary-led capture and transport operation, along with the construction of a “purpose-designed naturalistic habitat” for the animals.

In a public statement, Ambani said the hippos “did not choose where they were born,” and argued that a humane solution remains possible.

Yet even mercy has complications.

Gujarat’s summers rise above 40 degrees Celsius. Wildlife experts have questioned whether the animals could adapt. Others have raised concerns over Vantara’s rapid accumulation of rare and endangered species. Some conservationists warn that moving so many hippos across continents would be enormously expensive and stressful for the animals, and may create new challenges rather than resolve old ones.

And still, the river moves.

In Colombia, the hippos remain in the reeds and muddy shallows, chewing through grass beneath a sky that does not know their history. They are creatures of Africa, descendants of a narco fantasy, now folded into the ecology and folklore of another continent.

There is something strange in the shape of this story: the afterlife of wealth, the inheritance of excess, the long shadow of a dead kingpin cast not in money or violence, but in bodies rising from water.

Whether they are killed, sterilized, or sent across oceans, the question remains suspended in the humid air above the Magdalena: what do nations owe to the creatures made by human recklessness?

For now, the answer has not arrived.

Only the splash.

Only the ripple.

Only the slow turning of the river around them.

AI Image Disclaimer Visuals are AI-generated and intended as artistic representations of real-world events.

Sources The Times AFP Scientific American Reuters National Geographic