This truck is on a secret mission.
Its freight is unique and extraordinary.
We’ve just been told to come stand at the back of the vehicle.
In this area, you do not want to get caught up with the cartel.
A wild hippopotamus on its clandestine way through Colombian cartel lands.
But are there really wild hippos in Colombia?
And why are they being smuggled across the country?
The reason can be found here:
A theme park with artificial lakes in the middle of the countryside.
It's well stocked with a variety of bizarre dinosaur figures,
but it's also home to a distinct family of wildlife.
A group of more than 30 hippos call this outlandish theme park their home.
With a broad system of water holes and constant rainfall throughout the year,
they flourish in this hippo heaven,
but really they shouldn't be here at all.
These hippos live in the middle of Columbia,
150 kilometers east of Medellín.
But as a species, their natural home is in sub-Saharan Africa,
9,000 kilometers and an ocean away.
It all dates back to the 1980s
when the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar dominated the country.
Building an empire based on drug trafficking and terror,
he amassed incredible wealth.
Just like any drug lord cliché,
he loved spending his time on extravagant hobbies.
His estate and main hideout was the luxurious Hacienda Napoles,
a playboy ranch designed for lavish parties
and entertainment with his mobster friends.
But there was more.
The ostentatious gangster built a private zoo on the estate
with all kinds of illegally imported exotic animals.
The crowning glory was an enclosure with four hippos.
Escobar had allegedly fallen in love with these unusual animals.
In 1993,
Pablo Escobar was gunned down in a shootout with police in Medellín.
Following his death, the Colombian military seized his estate
and took charge of all the exotic animals there,
with most of them relocated to zoos or sanctuaries.
The only exceptions were the hippos.
Their removal turned out to be too complicated
and nowhere could take them in.
So today, decades after Escobar death,
Colombia is still wrestling with the mess he made.
The hippos and their offspring are still on his estate.
At sunset, they emerge from their pools
and travel long distances on land in search of food.
The boundaries of Hacienda Napoles are fairly easy for them to cross,
and footage from camera traps around the estate
shows that they routinely wander around the area at night.
They can travel up to 12 kilometers in one night,
affecting villages like Dordal in the immediate surroundings
or towns on the banks of the Rio Magdalena.
But the greatest fear stems from the footage like this:
Adult hippos grazing with their young
far outside the perimeter of the park.
This is an indication of splinter groups not returning to the estate,
but setting up new territories in other parts of Colombia.
50 kilometers to the west of the park lies Cocorná.
It's a small town on the banks of the river with the same name.
Here, reports of hippo sightings have been piling up recently.
It's a serious issue
as the Cocorná is a tributary of the Rio Magdalena,
which crosses almost the entire country from south to north.
And in fact, a large group of hippos have already settled in the area,
living independently from Hacienda Napoles in the wild.
But why is a bunch of wild hippos in Colombia really a problem?
The main issue lies in their biological and reproductive nature.
In the wild, hippos can live for up to 40 years.
That's likely to happen in Colombia,
where they have no natural enemies or droughts to contend with
and plenty of food all year long.
Hippos become sexually mature at the age of seven
and can produce one offspring a year.
This means that every single female hippo
could have up to 30 calves during the course of her life,
resulting in an unfettered population explosion.
Most biologists see an ecological disaster on the horizon.
Hippos are so-called ecosystem engineers.
They change their environment through their nutrition
and the production of vast amounts of feces.
This has a major impact on the composition
and oxygen content of the water they live in,
dramatically changing the vegetation.
Other endemic species like tapirs,
giant otters
and manatees are at risk of being displaced.
But it's not only local wildlife that's affected.
Reports of hippos entering towns in residential areas
have increased in recent years.
Hippos are quite aggressive animals
and can be very dangerous to humans.
On their native continent, they kill up to 3,000 people a year.
In 2009, a male hippo displaying overly aggressive behavior
broke out in Hacienda Napoles and started attacking farmers.
The local population couldn't handle the situation
and had to call in the military.
The soldiers killed the hippo and released this trophy picture.
The photo sparked a storm of outrage and indignation.
The resulting series of protests by Colombian animal rights activists
put enough pressure on the government to make it legally protect the animals.
So today, up to 100 hippos are living under protection
in and around Escobar's former compound,
while their eventual fate remains up in the air.
Some people argue that they should be taken to zoos or sanctuaries,
but there isn't nearly enough space or resources to take them in
and keep them enclosed.
Others are for leaving them in the wild,
where they'd fill a niche as a keystone species for the ecosystem.
Although this approach is strongly disputed,
those in favor argue that nutrient pulses stemming from the hippos
could increase species diversity in Colombia's rivers.
They maintain that hippos could replace the giant herbivore species
that became extinct around 20,000 years ago.
However, the vast majority of biologists disagree with this approach,
saying that the concept has already been debunked in a study.
That leaves one final option for dealing with Pablo Escobar's as messy legacy:
sterilization.
But that's much harder than you might think.
First, a trip has to be built in the wild,
luring the animal in with food and shutting the door so it can't escape.
Then, the hippo has to be anesthetized before vets can get close to it.
The sedated hippo has to be taken out of the water
and prepared for surgery.
Not an easy task in the muddy terrain.
A team of vets then carries out the operation on the spot.
The surgery can take several hours in the hot and humid tropical climate.
But they're still not done.
If the operation is successful,
the team has to collect the animal and load it into a truck
for the long journey to a sanctuary.
The hippo is simply too weak
and the risk of infection too high to leave it in the wild.
This journey isn't an easy one at all
as it crosses through areas controlled by Colombian drug cartels.
Freight like this would be an easy and lucrative target for them.
Once at the sanctuary,
the hippo is housed in a fenced pool where it is monitored for several weeks
before being released back into the wild.
With very few options and resources available,
Colombia's hippo problem is far from being solved.
But one thing is crystal clear:
The country is running out of time
to tackle Pablo Escobar's wildest legacy.