Two months ago, Colombian media briefly reported on one of my favorite local stories: The torturous life of a group of hippopotamuses that escaped from Pablo Escobar’s personal zoo.  The hippos are still roaming the country’s rivers at will, terrifying Colombian campesinos and fishermen along the way.

One of the fugitive hippos was last seen in February wading in a tributary (see photo) of the Magdalena River – Colombia’s Mississippi.

In the early 1980s, drug lord Pablo Escobar imported four hippos, flying them in on a huge Russian cargo plane, along with giraffes, zebras, buffalos, and ostriches. The plane landed on his private airstrip, which was next to his private three-story bullring. (By 1989, Pablo had become Forbes' seventh richest-person in the world.)

Apparently, it was the giraffes that most frightened the campesinos unloading the exotic cargo. When they came running out of the plane’s cavernous hull, the mustachioed drug capo is said to have broke down laughing.

The animals’ new home was the Hacienda Napoles, Pablo’s 5,500-acre playpen – a ranch five times the size of New York’s Central Park. The hippos thrived in the tropical climate, multiplying to a herd of 19.

Toward the end of his life, Pablo had created a narco-version of Noah’s arc: Besides the giraffes, zebras, buffalos, and ostriches, he also had lions, elephants, camels, deer, alligators, and more. He had tons of fresh shrimp flown in from the Caribbean every week to feed his flock of flamingos so that the standard pink-tone of their plumage wouldn’t fade. Following Pablo's commands, it took weeks for his small army of hacienda workers to train a flock of white cranes to perch in the trees surrounding his mansion; El Patrón, as he was known, liked the way they looked there. And then there were the three-ton hippos.

Pablo’s arc effectively ran aground after he was gunned down on a Medellín rooftop on December 2, 1993 – a day after his 44th birthday – ending an intense international manhunt. The government seized the property, and shipped most of the animals off to zoos around the country; others simply died in Napoles from neglect, but not the hippos.

The government left the dangerous herd alone. Hippos are known to be the cause of more civilian deaths than any other animal in Africa, and I can imagine the local bureaucrats were simply at a logistical loss of alternatives.

Hacienda Napoles became overgrown and decayed, as the government fought a long and eventually successful legal battle with Escobar’s relatives over ownership of the property. Meanwhile, campesino refugees squatted on parts of the farm. But the hippos continued to dominate the estate’s numerous man-made lakes.

In 2007, something drove two of the hippos to slink off the property into the waters of the nearby Magdalena River. In his book, Zoólogico Colombia, journalist José Alejandro Castaño supposes that the hippos left because the herd’s alpha male, which local squatters named “Pablito” because of his violent nature, had blocked their efforts at finding a mate among the females. (Alpha hippos can be hostile toward other males cruising for mates.)

But according to recent reports, it turns out the two escaped hippos are not both males; one is male and the other is female. What’s more, the cow has been spotted with a hippo calf in tow. It’s plausible the two hippos were victims of Pablito’s beach-master-status, and they left Napoles to consummate their unrequited love. 

Alas, it seems the couple split and parted ways. In the article published two months ago, authorities said they were hot on the trail of the female hippo and her baby, but admitted they had lost all trace of the male hippo.

Since then, however, no new reports of the hippos have surfaced. So the cow and her baby are still at large, and the bull hasn't been seen in months. Maybe the couple reunited, secretly living out their romance in the waters of the Magdalena.