The cocaine kingpin’s wildest legacy: what can be done with Pablo Escobar’s marauding hippos?

Romero, a solid man with black-framed spectacles and a pink camouflage shirt, scanned the river and pointed straight ahead. Near the opposite bank, about 250 metres away, three pairs of grey ears flicked, and beady eyes darted above the water line. The boatman circled cautiously, then winced when Wilson suddenly launched an aerial drone and banged on the boat’s gunwale to get the animals’ attention. One raised a gigantic, bulbous head and opened its mouth, exposing a sharp set of canines. “Tourists think this is cute,” Romero told me in Spanish. “But it’s a sign of aggression.”