In the slow, green waters of Colombia’s Magdalena River basin, the mornings arrive thick with mist.

The reeds lean into the current. Birds skim low over the surface. Fishermen move quietly through channels worn by years and weather, by flood and drought, by the long patience of the river. And sometimes, in the half-light, the water stirs with something larger—an ancient back rising like a dark island, a pair of eyes breaking the mirror of the dawn.

The story of Pablo Escobar’s hippos has always felt like a fable written by history in an absurd hand.

They began as an extravagance in the 1980s, when the Colombian drug lord imported exotic animals to his private estate, Hacienda Nápoles, in a landscape that was never meant to hold them. After Escobar’s death in 1993, the gates were left open and the animals wandered into the wetlands and rivers beyond. There were only four at first. Now there are nearly 200, by some estimates more, moving through Colombia’s interior like a strange inheritance no one intended to keep.

This month, Colombia’s government announced plans to euthanize around 80 of the so-called “cocaine hippos,” citing the escalating environmental and public safety risks they pose. Officials say the population, if left unchecked, could exceed 500 by 2030. The animals trample vegetation, pollute waterways with waste, disrupt fragile ecosystems, and threaten native species such as manatees and capybaras. They are also unpredictable and territorial—dangerous in a country where rivers are roads and water is livelihood.

For years, authorities tried gentler measures. Sterilization campaigns were costly and slow. Relocation efforts faltered under the weight of logistics and politics. Returning the animals to Africa was deemed impractical, with concerns over disease, genetics, and the sheer scale of the operation. So the conversation turned, reluctantly, toward culling.

And then, from another continent, came an offer.

Anant Ambani, the youngest son of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, has asked Colombia to pause the cull and allow 80 of the hippos to be moved to Vantara, his family’s sprawling wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center in Gujarat, western India. In a statement, Ambani described the animals as “sentient beings” caught in circumstances they did not create, and proposed what he called a “safe, scientifically led translocation.”

The image itself feels almost cinematic: hippos lifted from the tropical rivers of South America and flown across oceans to the dry heat of Gujarat, to a sanctuary built of ambition, wealth, and conservation rhetoric.

Vantara says it has the expertise and infrastructure. The center already houses thousands of animals—elephants, lions, tigers, leopards, crocodiles—within one of the world’s largest private wildlife facilities. Yet the proposal has stirred debate as swiftly as the hippos once stirred Colombian waters.

Critics question whether the sanctuary is the right answer, citing concerns over transparency and allegations related to wildlife acquisitions. Others ask whether relocation merely shifts the problem rather than solving it. Conservationists remain divided between compassion for individual animals and responsibility toward ecosystems already under strain.

It is, in many ways, a modern dilemma: how to weigh mercy against ecology, spectacle against science, symbolism against practicality.

The hippos themselves know none of this.

They graze by night. They wallow by day. They move through warm rivers that have become their own by accident and time. Their existence is the residue of a dead empire—Escobar’s fantasy hardened into biology, multiplying quietly in the marshes long after the guns fell silent.

Now their fate may rest in boardrooms and ministries, in diplomatic letters and veterinary spreadsheets, in the arithmetic of transport costs and environmental forecasts.

For Colombia, the decision is no longer simply about animals. It is about rivers and native species, about rural communities and state responsibility, about how a nation untangles the ecological aftermath of one man’s excess.

And somewhere in the wetlands, beneath a broad and indifferent sky, the water closes again over dark backs and watchful eyes.

The river keeps moving. The debate does too.

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Sources The Guardian The Times CBS News El País CNN