Colombia’s Escobar Hippos May Fly East as Old Crimes Resurface

The proposed transfer of 80 Colombian hippos to India turns Pablo Escobar’s private zoo into a global conservation trial, testing whether Colombia can undo a narco-era ecological crime without exporting danger, controversy, or responsibility across oceans and borders once more.

The Narco Zoo That Would Not Die

The crime scene was never only a mansion, a runway, a private army, or a ledger of cocaine routes. In Colombia, Pablo Escobar also left behind animals.

Decades after the drug lord’s death, his imported hippos still move through the Magdalena River basin like living evidence from a case nobody quite knows how to close. They are not guilty, of course. They did not choose Colombia. They did not choose Hacienda Nápoles, the narco estate where spectacle, money, and violence once performed for itself. But they have become one of the strangest inheritances of the Escobar era: massive, territorial, reproducing, dangerous, and out of place.

Now, a proposal by Indian billionaire heir Anant Ambani to take 80 Colombian hippos to India has become one of the most ambitious wildlife relocation plans in recent memory. The operation would send the animals on a 15,000-kilometer air journey to western India, where Ambani, the youngest son of Asia’s richest man, has spent years building Vantara, a private zoo and wildlife rescue center. EFE reported that much of the logistics has been in planning since 2023, when Ambani and Mexico’s Ostok Sanctuary began asking Colombia’s government to allow hippos to be transferred to their countries.

The number alone sounds unreal: 80 hippos, some weighing more than 3 tons, were moved by truck, in crates, and by cargo aircraft from the Colombian interior to India. But the oddness should not distract from the stakes. Colombia is not merely trying to move animals. It is trying to manage the biological afterlife of organized crime.

EFE quoted Ostok director Ernesto Zazueta, who has been involved in negotiations with Colombia, saying the move from Colombia to India would cost about $3 million. He described a process that would begin by baiting the hippos into corrals already built by the local environmental authority. Once enclosed, specialists would use food to train the animals to respond without anesthesia, preparing them for specially designed crates, or guacales, for the trip across the world.

The plan would then send the animals by truck to an airport near Medellín, where they would be loaded onto three cargo planes operated by a Belarusian company. Zazueta told EFE the journey would take roughly 33 hours to Jamnagar, the Indian city where Vantara is located, adding that for a calm, fed, and attended animal, nothing should happen.

That confidence is part reassurance, part gamble.

A Rescue Plan With Teeth

The funding remains unclear. Ambani’s letter to Colombia’s government reportedly offered to receive the animals. Still, it did not specify whether he would pay for the relocation. Zazueta told EFE that Vantara may assume much of the cost, as it has done before with Ostok, which has sent nearly 200 rescued big cats to the Indian facility.

The larger problem is permission. This is not a private shipment of exotic cargo. It requires authorization from Colombia and India, as well as compliance with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Colombia’s Environment Ministry sent a formal request to India asking whether it would authorize the transfer and whether Vantara has the required CITES permits to receive the hippos.

Environment Minister Irene Vélez warned that translocation requires more than private willingness. It needs government environmental permits and strict compliance with international biodiversity agreements ratified by Colombia. That statement matters because Colombia is trying to prove that it can act as a serious environmental state, even while dealing with the absurd residue of a narco fantasy.

The shadow over the plan is Vantara itself. The 1,200-hectare artificial ecosystem was built amid the infrastructure of the world’s largest oil refinery and has faced accusations of malpractice and illegal wildlife trafficking. India’s Supreme Court dismissed those accusations in September 2025. However, Indian conservation experts have still questioned the facility’s transparency and the conservation value of the project.

One senior Indian environmental scientist, who asked EFE for anonymity to avoid conflict with the wealthy Ambani family, argued that India has its own endangered wildlife needs and that millions of dollars would be better spent on conservation there. Indian environmental scientist and researcher Ravi Chellam was sharper. He told EFE that Vantara is in a region unsuitable for hippos and called it a crime to prioritize water and resources for captive hippos, already classified as invasive, over human needs.

That word, crime, brings the story back to Colombia.

Colombia’s Inheritance of Violence

The hippos are no longer a cute national oddity. Colombian authorities and experts warn that their presence threatens aquatic ecosystems, especially native species such as the manatee. Because hippos are territorial and aggressive, they also pose risks to riverside communities. The Humboldt Institute warned in a 2022 report that its expansion endangers both ecosystems and people.

In mid-April, Colombia’s Environment Ministry announced it would sacrifice 80 hippos to slow a reproductive boom that, without control measures, could push the population to 1,000 by 2035. That is the grim arithmetic behind the relocation proposal. Either Colombia kills some of Escobar’s imported animals, sterilizes and contains them at enormous cost, or exports part of the problem elsewhere.

There is no clean ending. Killing the animals feels brutal because they are living beings trapped in a story created by human vanity. Moving them to India feels dramatic, perhaps merciful. Still, it raises questions about whether Colombia is solving a crisis or transferring it into another billionaire-controlled enclosure. Leaving them alone would mean allowing a narco-era mistake to keep reproducing through Colombian wetlands.

For Colombia, the deeper meaning is that organized crime does not end when the criminal dies. It leaves architecture, trauma, money trails, widows, myths, political corruption, orphaned violence, and, in this surreal case, an invasive megafauna population. Escobar’s hippos are proof that narco power altered not only institutions and neighborhoods, but nature itself.

That is why this story matters beyond conservation. Colombia is trying to move from the age of narco spectacle into the age of environmental responsibility. Yet the past keeps surfacing, huge and gray, in the river. The state must now spend money, diplomatic capital, and moral energy cleaning up what one criminal’s empire unleashed.

If the India transfer happens, it will be remembered as a strange global rescue mission. If it fails, Colombia will return to the harder question of culling animals that never asked to be symbols. Either way, the hippos have already done what ghosts do in Latin America. They have refused to stay buried.

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