Pablo's Hippos Storyville

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing.

GUNFIRE, EXPLOSIONS

ENGINE HUMS

GUNSHOTS

HIPPO PANTS

-Grandpa, grandpa!

-I'm coming.

-Some more humans walking by the lake!

-I'm...coming!

-GRANDPA GROANS

What is it, little one?

Humans are coming towards the lake. I think they have weapons.

Don't you worry about the humans.

They are silly creatures. They only come to look and admire us.

Most of them have never seen anything as big and powerful as us.

It is only natural that they stare.

There was a time when there were none of our kind here.

A great beast brought us all here.

El Patron was a fantastic beast.

He brought us all here to the Garden of Eden.

Or, as the humans call it...

Hacienda Napoles.

He was feared by the males and loved by the females.

A true alpha male.

And it takes one to know one.

Next!

Pablo was the sort of person that could have anyone.

When a journalist asked him, of all the women in the world, which would he would most like to sleep with,

the answer was one that shook him, which was, "Margaret Thatcher."

The fact that he couldn't have Margaret Thatcher probably has a lot to do with his answer.

I don't know whether there's a link to the elephant that's called Maggie.

Ah! Those were the days.

El Patron made sure I had everything. Everything I wanted, I ate.

Sometimes I had 12 lunches a day.

And there was always someone there to clean up after me.

Good service back then.

Take one stop closer, little beast.

Go ahead and make my day!

I mean, there are some people who say they saw one.

Then a couple of months later they saw another one.

Then some people say they saw one floating down the river, dead.

So I think no-one really knows how many there are out in the wild

or in the river, upstream or downstream.

They will never contain us!

I would like to see them try to stop me from doing what I do best.

It is good to be alpha.

Next!

Why did El Patron brought us all here?

He brought us because we were like him - powerful beasts.

How did he get so powerful?

Hey, you ask a lot of questions, little one.

El Patron, he was a genius.

He created a very special kind of herd.

The humans, they called it El Cartel.

And his cartel made him the seventh most powerful beast on earth.

And, if you don't believe me, take a look at the magazine.

-Huh?

-HE CHUCKLES

I remember my mother saying how nice these neighbours,

which are giving us a little envelope for the Church.

Instead of the 2 by family, they give us 1,000 in an envelope.

Drug trafficking was a novelty.

People didn't realise what it meant

and what we were getting into as a society.

Back in America's history, Al Capone is a famous name, a famous figure, an icon.

And if you ask who is the modern-day equivalent,

probably just about nobody has

attained the notoriety in the last few decades as Pablo Escobar did.

He did fantasise about...

creating a brand, Escobar Cocaine, which would be distributed one day in America as cigarettes are.

He apparently told his public relations manager, a guy called El Poeta,

to cut out all the clippings he could about the Hell's Angels,

because he was convinced that one day these would be his sellers of cocaine in the US.

Like a great alpha male, El Patron's herd grew and grew.

He had absolute control.

Just like me.

Ah, life was good back then.

There was a time when this place was paradise.

Sure, the noise was a bit much - the drugs and planes coming and going, day-in and day-out.

The occasional popping sounds and screams in the distance but, hey, we lived like kings!

The lions,

they had nothing on us.

Ah, how things have changed now.

At least...it is quiet.

We have a country that has a very, very high biodiversity, a lot of species of all kinds in Colombia.

We can't cope with the species we have - we have enough people and enough problems.

We have some nice people that say, well, they can take three.

Then what do we do with the other 17?

I would think that...

it's only a time...a problem of time till people kill them or shoot them...

and probably eat them.

The hippos were taken over by the government

when they took over all the property of Pablo Escobar.

They now belong to the government.

The government has to find a way out.

He was a person that understood poverty,

and somehow he came there when the state wasn't there.

CHEERING

Pablo - as a congressman - has immunity.

That's one of the benefits of being a congressman and one of the reasons he stands for Congress.

You have a situation where major gangsters achieve such power

that they begin to threaten and challenge the legitimate authority.

Where the most influential - mayors, police chiefs, legislators

and legitimate businessmen - realise they need to do business.

Where that gangster becomes one of the most prominent people.

In 1982, in that time I was

correspondent of my newspaper in Europe.

I was covering the Spanish elections.

There was a big celebration at the Palace Hotel in Madrid.

There was a Columbian friend who said, "Come to the table of the Colombian delegation."

On that table was sitting this anonymous-looking guy with a moustache.

Heavy cheeks... Very inconspicuous.

Everybody recognised that this is Pablo Escobar.

We sat down at the table and I remember I spoke to him.

At that time he was importing all kinds of wild animals to his farm.

I remember I told him, "You are a very ecological guy, this is unbelievable what you are doing."

I think they should keep here.

Protect them...

And... Yeah, protect them and maybe use for food or...tourism.

So many things that you can do with them.

It seems that one hippo drowned because some fishermen saw it floating down the river.

We also know that one hippo was electrocuted.

And I think they ate that hippo.

As far as I know, I've never heard of hippos being raised for meat.

It is not at all a current practice.

-Who's in charge of us now?

-No-one is in charge of us! Especially not the humans.

They take every problem and make it worse.

They are dumb creatures, brains the size of mangoes.

How big is your brain, Grandpa?

I don't know, I've never seen it...

But it must be huge.

Look at the size of my head.

President Reagan is in Miami, stepping up his campaign against

America's most flourishing underground industry, drug smuggling.

South Florida is the funnel for massive illegal imports of cocaine and marijuana from South America.

In the early 1980s,

President Reagan declared a global sort of attack on the international drug trade.

We mean to end their profits, imprison their members and cripple their organisations.

The Colombian government signed an extradition treaty

with the United States in 1982.

My father was a very young politician.

And with Luis Carlos Galan...

they start a new political party, which is Nuevo Liberalismo - New Liberalism.

And he was appointed Justice Minister in 1983.

My father tried to extradite several drug traffickers.

But the President, Mr Betancur, refused to extradite,

because he thought that all Colombians should be judged here in Colombia, not in the United States.

So my father starts to fight Pablo Escobar and all his organisation.

He was at the point of opening a judicial case against politicians involved with the Cartel of Medellin.

He never recognised he had committed a crime, he had done anything wrong.

He always say he was not a narco trafficker.

It was incredible.

The problem was, many people believed him.

Big debate against Lara, it was the speaker of the house.

They had to preside with that debate.

Escobar was in that session.

It was a terrible session.

Escobar got in with people with arms, it was a very terrible moment.

My father, he knew that he was in danger.

He knew that he could get killed at any moment.

We were planning to leave the country, to Czechoslovakia.

He thought he would be safe there.

GUNSHOTS

We all know that Pablo Escobar and the cartel killed my father.

Everybody knows that.

But actually, we don't have it judicially true, because the judge was a shot,

the witnesses were shot and the lawyer was shot.

So...

This country never really thought that these people were that bad

or that this was a big problem

until they killed Rodrigo Lara.

Like all great alpha males,

El Patron was surrounded by dangerous animals.

He had to defend himself.

Just like me. I take care of you and I take care of the herd.

I have always protected the lake.

HE ROARS

I think that if somebody was killed by a hippo so that the

Colombian government would take interest on this issue.

I think it would probably help but it wouldn't be enough.

I think we would need quite a few to be killed.

So many Colombians die and for so many strange reasons

that we can't even know if there are some hippo reasons in there.

Pablo is somebody who is dedicated,

from the moment the extradition treaty was put into place in the early 80s, to bringing it down.

It was very difficult to get an order from a judge.

It was almost impossible to get a condemnation sentence to condemn any narco trafficker.

Why do they want to take us away from here, Grandpa?

Because they are jealous.

They wanted to do the same with El Patron, they wanted to take him away to a kind of zoo in a far away land.

Do the humans want to put us in a zoo?

They won't while I'm alive!

Like El Patron said - I would rather have a tomb here in the lake than a cage...

somewhere else...

Where ever that is!

GUNSHOTS

Escobar bombed the newspapers.

He assassinated from reporters to editors to publishers.

GUNSHOTS

Escobar began a culture of kids serving drug traffickers,

killing themselves or killing others

just because of drugs or money to save the life of their parents

or their neighbourhood.

We must watch our backs, there is always someone who wants to take what you have.

There was always someone lurking nearby trying to stop El Patron,

and they were always sorry they did.

We had Cali, and the Cali Cartel trying to kill Escobar, so we had this other enemy.

He didn't care. The people he killed - were they enemies or not.

Some of the people he killed had already met him, compromised with him that they were

going to behave well with him and they kill them anyway.

And we had a siege, a society that was totally frightened about what was going on.

In the 80s I met with Carlos Galan.

What country would we have today if Galan would have been President of Colombia?

Maybe none of these would have happened.

Galan represented the hope for a new Colombia.

He was a guy who really connected with the youth.

Very outspoken against a drug traffickers from the beginning.

Galan could not be bought.

So Escobar and his cronies knew that Galan as a President, they would have a real problem.

He was killed.

We were all a bunch of kids at the time.

We just had to go on with a new candidate.

So they killed the illusion and the possibilities of a country to change after such violence.

His assassination really traumatised Colombian society.

The biggest mass demonstrations of Colombians in the street were after Galan's assassination.

And when he killed Galan,

then I had to take the candidacy of that movement.

And came probably the most terrible period of the Colombian society,

where he blew up a building of the agency of security of Colombia.

He brought down a plane.

He brought down that plane with the idea of killing me.

At that time, Pablo is effectively trying to destabilise the country.

To create a clear link between extradition and bombs.

In the campaign where we had six presidential candidates, he killed three.

It was really a threat to Colombian democracy and Colombian institutions.

He really got to intimidate Colombian society.

The killing of Carlos Galan, the killing of Pardo Leal.

The killing of three presidential candidates

all brings the government effectively to its knees.

You know, that represents a threat to the sovereign authority of the state,

not by a political insurgency but

by what I'd call economic insurgency that is fighting for ever greater power and profits.

It doesn't happen very often in most countries.

Many people took a lot of risk through those years, and many people just lost their lives.

We will not be caught alive, that's for sure.

And it's going to take more than a few men with cameras to take us from here.

A small group was well trained. The best intelligence,

the support of the Americans, the support of the British, the support of the Israelis.

All that was put together.

A number of people who've been against Pablo over the years

begin to provide information to the Columbian justice system.

They really grind down the Colombian people too a point where

they will accept anything to end the bombs, to end the violence.

It's only on the day that he does get what he wants that he eventually hands himself in.

The head of the world's biggest cocaine smuggling organisation,

Pablo Escobar, has given himself up to the Colombian authorities

in what he calls an act of peace.

He surrendered after it was decided to ban the extradition of Colombia nationals to the United States.

Escobar is wanted in the United States for murder and drug trafficking.

I wrote a column saying,

how is it possible that this guy who's in prison and can have orgies with bras and German beer?

Three days later I received a letter saying, "Look, Enrique,

"I don't remember ever inviting you to any of my parties.

"I want you to know that the women there were our wives and there were no German beer served.

"Pablo Escobar." I received a letter like this - Holy Christ!

I published an retraction in recognition that

at that party, the women are the respectable wives of the detainees

and that it was not German beer but Dutch beer, because the bottles were Heineken.

As usually happens with mafia, he just was unable to get out of crime.

He kept, er, kidnapping people, killing people.

And at the end, he was bringing people to that jail and killing them inside the jail.

The one thing I learned from El Patron,

it is better to be feared than loved! Grrr!

We knew through the Attorney General that Escobar was committing these crimes.

We took the decision to move him from that prison to a prison in Bogota.

And it was a very strange thing, how that order started to be

slowed down, slowed down and slowed down into the night.

And then some very stupid thing happened, that he sent the civilians to talk to Escobar,

which was totally incomprehensible, how that happened.

He has a capacity of intimidation, that he will just walk to

the soldiers of the brigade, and they were so intimidated that he just walked away.

The United States has said it's appalled at the escape from prison

in Colombia of the drugs baron Pablo Escobar.

He and nine other members of the powerful Medellin cocaine cartel

were being transferred to a military base when they disappeared.

We discovered that Escobar could have escaped almost any day, at any time, he could just walk away.

I don't understand, how did he escape from the zoo?

You have to remember that humans are a coward breed.

There was no-one brave enough to stop him.

He owned the place!

Ah, you should have seen him.

El Patron had tusks the size of tree trunks!

There had been other people who had organisations as big or as powerful as his, but he was

the one who emerged at the time when

America was focused on the drug war like never before and never since.

Symbolically, it was very important for everyone just to get rid of him.

He went back to his heart, back to war.

But in a faraway land, there was another alpha.

Huh, this one didn't look like it, but he was

a very powerful beast.

This is crack cocaine,

seized a few days ago by drug enforcement agents

in a park just across the street from the White House.

And our message to the drug cartels is this - the rules have changed.

The United States only got involved when it was a defiance to democracy in Latin America.

And somehow, Escobar thought he could defy that.

We had 15 people dying every weekend

in Medellin younger than 15, and we had a policeman practically a day.

No matter how crazy it was, El Patron never stopped thinking about us.

We were one herd,

we just had

to lay low.

Those days were dark days.

Things were changing fast.

He gave me this, so I would never forget him.

We look alike, no?

If only I had a moustache.

El Patron was forced to go into hiding.

Many of the animals did not survive.

Some ran off with their tails between their legs, never to be seen again.

The elephants were stolen by a circus, and God only knows what happened to those noisy giraffes.

Huh, I think they were eaten by humans!

But not us, we stayed here and we thrived.

I knew it was up to us to carry on El Patron's herd.

Next!

They can be sold as the hippopotamus Escobares,

or something like that, for certain zoos, or they can be sold for people

that want to have a hippopotamus on their farm somewhere.

Or they can be... you can organise some

sophisticated and very expensive safaris

and have people come and shoot them.

Anything. I mean, we have a problem with those hippos

and we have to get rid of them.

How do you get rid of a hippo?

It's not only the amount of meat they have, it's also

the reaction in the people.

People don't mind if you go and hit a frog over the head, or if you

go and poison a couple of insects, but if you go and shoot a hippo, then everyone's going to react.

Are we really so dangerous?

We can be. But we are nothing compared to the humans.

We only attack when we are forced to.

They, they are a vicious species.

Blood is in their blood.

Not El Patron though.

He was like us, he only killed

when it was absolutely necessary, and he never took pride in it.

I was told that they were certain they had been killed by the Bloque

de Busqueda, and then the other information came through the radio.

That always happens in Colombia. If you want to be well informed, it's better that you hear the radio...

than wait for the authorities to tell you!

First of all, it's a very strange sensation, because I was,

I was very satisfied, but I could not show to be happy.

You could not look to the people that you were happy because you'd

killed someone, no matter that it was the worst criminal.

It was quite a strange feeling.

I still remember the day he died.

Part of me died that day too.

In my heart, I knew it would happen eventually,

but part of me thought he would live forever!

Since that day, life has been tough here at the lake,

but we will prevail!

They will never take us away from here!

Argh!

Grandpa!

Argh!

We have to get rid of the animals some way or another, so if somebody

turns up and says they are willing to take them, please take them.

Grandpa, is it you?

Are you alive?

Oh, it doesn't work that way.

Huh... This is nature's way, we all die.

The lions, they call it the circle of life,

and the humans have never been able to accept that.

Don't worry, one alpha male will always be replaced by a new one.

Like with El Patron.

There will always be someone else,

there will never be an end to this herd.

Where are you going?!

To see my old friend.

It's now up to you and the others

to continue the legacy.

Every month, every two months, a drug lord is captured or jailed,

or extradited to the United States, and three or four more candidates are eager to take that place.

The problem with drug trafficking is that it always gets worse.

I mean, it's a society that is unable to stop.

You know? So it finds ways.

After 40 years and billions of dollars spent,

thousands of people killed,

the result is that more cocaine is being produced.

And the tragedy is that the war on drugs

has been an utter failure.

What we have to ask is if what we are doing is working.

Is the policy in place effective?

We tried everything and nothing worked.

And we're even worse now than we were in Escobar's time.

Maybe then it was, like, more naive, if you like.

You know that won't finish in our country unless we

solve the problem of drugs, and that cannot be solved just by ourselves.

And at the end of the empire of Escobar, the only thing left really, the only thing left

are the wild hippopotamus. There is nothing else.

What a vision you had!

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