How screwed up are things in Colombia? Check out this "false positive."

[rabs]

The paramiltary massacres of tens of thousands of people over the years under the murderous Uribe regime have left many Colombians innured.

But there was one killing the other day that shocked the country and has generated a big internal and international outcry.



Colombian soldiers pose next to a hippopotamus killed by two professional hunters in Puerto Berrio. A government agency ordered the hippo killed as a health risk and a menace to farmers and fishermen.


From weekly Bogota newsmagazine Semana:


EnvironmentHuge controversy in Colombia after it was revealed that an African hippo originally brought to the country by the late drug lord Pablo Escobar has been killed with the help of the Army.

At the end of last week, a curious photo was published in Colombia. It showed the carcass of a huge male hippopotamus, lying on the grass in Antioquia province, surrounded by sixteen heavily armed soldiers. The immense animal, which once belonged to Colombia’s most famous drug lord, Pablo Escobar, was shot dead by hunters with the consent of Corantioquia, a regional organization which sets out to protect natural resources, and with assistance from Colombia’s Army.

After the drug baron’s death, in 1993, his farm was taken over by the small town of Puerto Triunfo with supervision by Colombia’s National Narcotics Directorate (DNE, in Spanish) and has become a theme park that is visited by tourists from over the world. It has still got around 20 hippopotamuses, apart from the two that escaped a couple of years ago down Colombia’s main river, the Magdalena. These are precisely the ones that are in the midst of the debate: they had been living freely until Corantioquia gave the order to shoot them dead. One was Pepe, who was recently killed, whereas his female companion, plus a baby hippo, are still on the loose.

Daniel Samper Pizano, one of Colombia’s most influential journalists, wrote that “the manifest inability of the authorities to stop it from escaping is only equal to their inefficiency in capturing it and finding it a home (…) The photo of the smiling soldiers next to the pink carcass of Pepe will become yet another of Colombia’s disgraces”.

The whole situation with Pepe epitomizes Colombia’s difficulty in tackling some of the main problems it faces: a culture which revolves around the immense power of illegal money and the appetite for luxury and extravagance; the near ubiquitous influence of drug trafficking in Colombia’s recent history, and especially the fact that the country has found it impossible to resolve those issues in any way other than militarily.


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(The hunters have received orders to kill the momma hippo and the baby.)

Semana story here (in English)

http://www.semana.com/noticias-international/the-heated-debate-about-drug-lords-killed-hippopotamus/126237.aspx

[Judi Lynn]

1. That's so damned sick. It's not the animals' fault they are there. They would have preferred

to stay where they were originally before that Colombian monster forced them to live in his mosquito infested mudpit.

I hope a lot more people make so much noise an effort will be made to take the other two critters alive and allow them to go somewhere safe.

This is so sad.

There's no chance these pets are any danger to anyone unless they sit on them.

[Bacchus39]

2. hippos are among the most dangerous animals to humans

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippopotamus

and this thing was roaming freely. not to mention they obviously aren't native to Colombia.

[Billy Burnett]

3. Humans are the most dangerous animals to hippos.

Of all things to defend, you have stooped as low as possibly imaginable.

You make me sick. :puke:

[Bacchus39]

4. Killing a dangerous feral animal running around loose is sick??

hippos don't belong running free in Colombia. would you support killing a lion or tiger that was roaming the Colombian or US country side for that matter.

Wild hogs in the US have wreaked ecological havoc on some forest lands in the US. there are eradication programs for these animals too.