Medellin cartel leader Pablo Escobar’s legacy continues to negatively impact his home country thirty years after his death, as the nation deals with a bloat of hippos spawned by four animals the drug kingpin imported for his private zoo in the 1980s, CNN reports.
Colombia is shipping 60 hippos to India and ten to Mexico from the 140-160 hippos that inhabit the rivers around Medellin, the descendants of the one male and three females Escobar obtained. The bloat has become a tourist attraction in the region, so the Colombian government opted to keep a number of animals rather than translocated the entire group or euthanize the hippos.
The reason the animals are being sent to India and Mexico, where they are not native species, and not back to Africa, the species’ native habitat, is to prevent the migration of pathogens the Colombian hippos may carry to the place of origin, where they could devastate the native bloats. Officials in all three countries–India, Mexico and Colombia–will undertake efforts to study how to control the reproduction of the animals so they don’t become an invasive species.