The first time a hippo emerged from the trees, waddled across the grass and slid down the river bank into the murky waters of the Cocorná River, the fishers in Las Angelitas froze in awe.
“We’d heard rumours of these hippos and seen footprints down-river but as we’ve never been to a zoo we’d never seen an animal like that in real life,” said Franki de Jesús Zapata Ciron. “An animal all the way from Africa, here? It seemed curious and beautiful.”
People stopped working and gathered to gaze at the 3-tonne beast, Zapata recalled. But as with previous chapters of Colombia’s 30-year saga with Pablo Escobar’s hippos, what started as
