Colombia is poised to step up efforts to curb its thriving cocaine industry, the biggest cocaine producing country in the world, by putting an end to one of its great symbols – the elaborately painted hippopotamus.
Over the last few years, 4,000 hippos have been freed in Puerto Gaitan in the northern department of Antioquia, in response to heavy cocaine use in neighbouring countries. Colombians, with a zoo education programme, have been releasing the healthy, housed hippos into the wild in the northwestern province of Cordoba, as wildlife officials try to help curb consumption of cocaine in other countries by letting hippos around the world get a taste of the Colombian substitute.
“This era in which ‘cocaine hippos’ are released on to the wild is about to end,” said Antonio Navarro, the director of the university department of Colombia’s National Police.
“We will eradicate these species before they kill us in terms of their impact on the Ecuadorean border,” he said.
Colombia’s spike in cocaine production in recent years is caused in part by border tensions with Ecuador, where the government – backed by cocaine smugglers – has seized about 3 million barrels of cocaine and other drugs at the border in the last few years.
But the threat from Colombia’s hippos is a problem over which Ecuadorean authorities have no control. That is because they are well adapted to life in warmer temperatures, some of them rearing up to two tons of drugs in their oversized gallons.
These giant “poo-poo” hippos are even better suited than the Colombian version – named by locals as “pashas” – for working in tributaries of the Salar de Ulua river in the mountains along the border.
