Pablo Escobar’s hippos are on their way to the homeland of “El Chapo” with a mission more daring than drug smuggling.
The ten animals are to be transported from Antioquia, Colombia, where the drug lord began a herd on his ranch, to one other cocaine stronghold in Sinaloa, the Mexican province that was home to cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and his sons. .
The hippos’ recent home shall be Jesús María, a town in the mountains of northwestern Mexico where Ovidio “El Ratón” Guzman was captured in January after a vicious shootout left 29 people dead and greater than 30 injured.
The younger Guzman’s nickname means “Mouse” or “Hangover”.
The Ostok Sanctuary is situated just outside of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa – a longtime stronghold of the Mexican drug cartel once led by El Chapo – who’s currently serving a life sentence for murder and drug trafficking in a Colorado federal supermax prison after his sentence in Brooklyn.
![Graphic showing the way Escobar's hippos move.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/pablo-cartel-hippos.jpg?w=1024)
The Hippo Movement is a $500,000 operation funded by Mexican conservationist Ernesto Zazueta, according to the report.
The hippos are a tiny fraction of the dozens living in Antioquia in northwestern Colombia, where Escobar ran a zoo at his Hacienda Nápoles ranch at the height of his power, heading the Medellin Cartel in the Eighties.
The 7,000-acre site, 100 miles from Medellín, reportedly cost $63 million and included an airstrip, a bullfighting arena, and a duplicate of Jurassic Park with half a dozen concrete dinosaurs.
![Joaquín](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000010840787.jpg?w=1024)
Escobar designed the estate with 12 artificial lakes, one of which was home to imported hippos when the drug kingpin lived.
He also used the ranch as a hangout for million-dollar cocaine deals and parties with teenage girls.
Escobar got two of his hippos from the San Diego Zoo in the early Eighties, and one other two from fellow drug dealers the Ochoa brothers.
Admission to Hacienda Nápoles was free for local residents who flocked to admire the animals.
![Pablo Escobar's kangaroo](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011952057.jpg?w=1024)
![Hippos by Pablo Escobar](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011952595.jpg?w=1024)
Nonetheless, after Escobar’s death, the hippos proved too cumbersome and expensive to move – around $40,000 per shipment – at a time when nearly half of Colombia’s population was said to live below the poverty line, so that they were left on the ranch.
Other exotic animals have been captured or killed.
Thirty years later, hippos have multiplied and now there are over 130 of them.
![Pablo Escobar](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011953643.jpg)
The population is the only wild hippo outside of its native Africa.
Colombian authorities fear that their population could increase to 400 in the next eight years.
They haven’t any natural predators, and migratory hippos have disrupted the local ecosystem and neighboring farms.
![Escobar's elephant](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011952974.jpg?w=1024)
![The drug lord also owned giant concrete dinosaurs.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011958830.jpg?w=1024)
In 2020, an area veterinarian launched an ambitious campaign to sterilize some hippos, but the delicate operation on the mammals, which might weigh up to three tons, was costly and slow, and failed to shrink the herd.
As a substitute, it greater than doubled from 60 in 2021.
Last month, after one of Escobar’s hippo descendants was hit on a dark section of the Bogota-Medellin highway, Antioquia Governor Anibel Gaviria demanded urgent motion.
His administration has devised a plan that uses bait to lure the mammals into pens, where they shall be locked in special crates and shipped all the way to India.
![Lake Escobar for hippos](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000007598199.jpg?w=1024)
![Escobar's dead hippo](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011952054.jpg?w=1024)
As well as to the 10 that may go to Mexico, 60 more will go to the Green Zoological Kingdom of Rescue and Rehabilitation in Gujarat.
“We’re going to usher in the youngest we will find to reduce the birth rate in Colombia, which could be very high,” Zazueta told Spain’s El Pais last week, adding that the goal of conservationists in Ostrok is to return hippos to their natural habitat in Africa.
Zazueta, a Sinaloa entrepreneur, told the newspaper that he had already returned other animals he had rescued from circuses and personal zoos to their natural habitat.
At the Ostok Sanctuary, hippos will stay alongside Big Boy, a 39-year-old African elephant who was rescued from a Mexican circus in 2021.
![Ovid](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000010576449.jpg?w=686)
![Aftermath of violence in Jesus Maria](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011954226-1.jpg?w=1024)
A 39-year-old male African elephant got here to Ostok Animal Protection & Sanctuary in 2021 and has now fallen in love with Bireki, a 31-year-old female who got here to the retreat last summer.
They should not the first exotic pets related to drug lords in Sinaloa.
In April, prosecutors accused El Chapo’s sons, known collectively as “Los Chapitos,” of feeding their enemies, dead or alive, the tigers they kept at a ranch in Navolato, Sinaloa.