What if you could remember everything? Everything you said, everything you did, everything other people said and did around you, everything you ate, everything you watched, everywhere you went, what if you could remember all of it? On this episode of The Vergecast brought to you by Meta, we explore how AI might make that possible and what it might mean to be a person in a world where nobody forgets anything ever again. That's The Vergecast, anywhere you get podcasts.
Hi, it's Phoebe. Before we get to today's show, we're very excited to announce that we're adding a second leg to our 10th anniversary tour. This fall, we're heading to cities that we didn't get to visit earlier this year. We'll be coming to Austin, Tucson, Boulder, Portland, Oregon, Detroit, Madison, North Hampton, and Atlanta. Lauren and I had so much fun telling these seven brand new stories that we decided we wanted to go back out on the road again. Tickets will be on
sale Friday, July 26th. If you're a criminal plus member, keep an eye on your email. You can get your tickets even earlier starting on Tuesday, July 23rd. You can find all the details at thisiscriminal.com slash live. See you on stage very soon. What is it like being so close to a hippo? What do they smell like? What's their skin like? This skin is not so nice. Sorry. When they get hurt in the wildlife hippos, they have this, thinking the skin like blood, but it's not blood. Dr. Gina Paolo Serna
is a wildlife veterinarian. She spoke to us from a apartment building where there was a lot of construction. The name hippopotamus comes from the Greek for river horse. Hippos spend most of their life in water in rivers and lakes. When they're out of the water, their skin dries out and can burn. They make a fluid to protect their skin. So they are like sweaty all the time. Hippos can grow to be over 16 feet long and about 5 feet tall. Male adults weigh about 3 or 4 tons, about as much as
a large SUV. They're the second largest land mammal on the planet after elephants. Hippos are very territorial. They've been known to attack lions and hyenas, and sometimes people. In 1996, during a canoeing trip, a man was partly swallowed by a hippo. He said later, he could feel the water from his waist down, but from the waist up, he said, quote, I was warm, and it was just incredible pressure on my lower back. I tried to move around. I couldn't.
The hippo spit him out. He survived. Many hippo attacks are fatal. Across Africa, it's estimated that 500 people are killed by hippos every year. Were you scared the first time you got close to one? Yes. They are not nice. So I'm always really, really careful about how I work with them, and I'm really, really scared every time I'm approaching a hippo. Scientists think that the hippos ancestors were one of the first large mammals on the African
continent before lions, giraffes, and buffalo. Most wild hippos are still found in Africa. But there is a group of wild hippos in South America in Colombia where Gina lives. We have hippos in Colombia because Pablo Escobar brought four hippos and the actual population of hippos they're here in Colombia are from these animals. How many hippos are there now? About two years ago, I participated in study and we count more or less 160 hippos. So from 3 to 160? Yeah, and that's I think now are more.
Pablo Escobar bought the land to build his ranch, Hasey and Anopolis in the 1970s. It contained a mansion and several separate residences, a sculpture garden, a motocross track, 27 artificial lakes, it had its own gas station and airfield. He kept a collection of classic cars there and built life-size dinosaur sculptures. And then, Pablo Escobar got the idea to build his own zoo. For a zoo, Pablo Escobar smuggled in over a thousand animals from wildlife breeders
in other countries like Brazil and the United States. Most of them had to be flown into the country late at night on military transport planes. Black parents, ostriches, elephants, rhinoceroses, camels, dolphins, kangaroos, and hippos. I'm Phoebe Judge, this is criminal. Growing up, Gina used to visit the zoo at Hasey and Anopolis. She was always interested in animals. She went with her father when he drove out to their cattle farm, but her father never let her do
any work. He said that girls are not made to be in their farms, but look at me I'm a wildlife bet. The farm was in Doradol, a few hours outside of Medellin near Hasey and Anopolis. So every time we go to the cattle farm, we stop in the Hasey and Anopolis zoo because it was open to the public. So anybody can go there and visit the animals. So because of my love for animals, I always say to my dad that please stop there. So we were going like every two weeks more and less.
I did not remember the hippos. My mom remembered it, but I did not remember because for me it was not so cool. For me, it was more cool or big animals like elephants and giraffes. So you always went straight for the elephants? Yes. What did the zoo look like? It was an open zoo. It did not have a lot of cages. So you can go through the road and you can stop and see the animals and touch the animals. Well, the animals that you can interact with.
The wild animals were like far. You can see it, but it would not like in big cages now. It was like completely different from the other zoos that I used to visit in Medellin or in other cities. Did you know that it was owned by Pablo Escobar? No, I was like a small girl and at that time, Pablo didn't have this bad image. For the people of Colombia, especially in the Medellin zone, Pablo Escobar was like a hero. So for me, it was only a nice guy who has a lot of animals and you can see it free.
Pablo Escobar said, this zoo belongs to the people. As long as I'm alive, I'll never charge an entrance fee. This is a big question to ask, but tell me who was Pablo Escobar? Pablo Escobar was born in Enbigal. Enbigal is a city next to Medellin. Right now, they're the same metropolitan area, like it's the same thing, but in those days, Enbigal has its own thing, has its own vibe. It's a city that's like, I don't know, Manhattan and Brooklyn, right? You know where you are
when you are there. Jorge Caraballo is a journalist from Medellin. And Pablo Escobar was from a family that was very humble. Eventually, when he was young, he started leading this little gang and they used to steal cars. That's what they started doing. And then eventually, he got connected to the big business in those years. This is the 70s. The big business in those years, which was Marijuana and later cocaine. He started dealing with these drugs, moving these drugs.
And I say that it was a big business because it was not that huge problem in the public health, in the newspapers, in the politicians agenda. I know people, for example, that in those years told me that they carried cocaine from a plane from Medellin to Miami in a suitcase, like no hiding it, no nothing. And there was no problem. There was no problem in taking drugs from the Colombia to the US because there was like not that security infrastructure that you see today.
So he started doing that. Pablo Escobar started moving drugs from Colombia to the US, mainly. And he started making a lot of money. And he was not hiding it. I mean, how much money are we talking about? We're talking about millions of dollars, eventually billions of dollars. In 1987, Forbes magazine listed Pablo Escobar as one of the richest men in the world. He would say on the list until his death. He made so much money that he didn't have time to launder at all.
Instead, he would bury stashes of money around Colombia. Pablo Escobar's brother, an accountant, Roberto Escobar, said that every year he would write off 10% of the cartel's profits from cash being lost or damaged from water or rats. Pablo Escobar started building complete neighborhoods for poor people. And like developing neighborhoods for like people that had no money. He started building houses, buying planes, buying farms, helicopters, animals. Like this is something that was kind of of,
like he was extravagant. And everyone in the city knew that. And they, they, they, people said that this is a incredibly smart business man. He knows how to do business. That's why he's rich. He's a developer. And if you, I was yesterday, I was talking to this woman who told me that in the 70s, she, she heard about Pablo Escobar. She had nothing. She, she was living basically on the street.
And she went with this friend every single day to a shopping mall that he had built in downtown Medellin just to see if they found him and asked him for money because that's what he was famous for. Like if you, if you met him, he was so warm, he was so helpful, he was so generous that he would give you money. He would just give you money away. Like he would give you a pack of bills for you, for you and your family. He could even give you a house. Like he was that. He had so much
money that he was just giving it away in ways that people found almost fantastic. Like is this real? Yes. It was real. He was giving that much money to people in the city. There were covers of magazines talking about him, talking about him as Paisa Robin Hood. Paisa is the way that people call people in Medellin in my region, where they're Paisas. So he was the Paisa Robin Hood. And eventually what happened is that in his plan, it was not enough for him to be extremely
rich to be extremely popular. He wanted more. So in the 80s, early 80s, he started a new campaign, a new mission for himself. He wanted to become Colombia's president. He started by running for Congress. He won as an alternate representative in 1982. He pushed for the Colombian government to back away from a treaty that would allow the United States to extradite drug traffickers. And there was nothing, nothing, that a drug dealer in Colombia feared more than going to the United States justice
system because they had no power there. Right? If they were caught in Colombia, there was a way, it was usually a way for them with so much power, with so much cash to get out. But if they were caught and they were extradited to the United States, that was the end of them. There was the end. There was a very, very, very powerful drug dealer of those years called Carlos Leder. And he was extradited in the late 80s. And he is still in an American prison today. He's still there.
As a member of Congress, Pablo Escobar had parliamentary immunity. He was also still running the Medellín Cartel's operations. The Minister of Justice, Rodrigo Laura Bonilla, criticized Pablo Escobar for being a drug trafficker. But in public, Pablo Escobar responded that he had no record of any drug trafficking charges. Then the Colombian newspaper, Ellis Becadour, ran a front page article about him,
saying that in 1976 he'd been arrested for possession of 39 pounds of cocaine. And that afterwards, the government agents who arrested him were killed. After the article came out, a judge reopened the investigation into their deaths. Pablo Escobar's immunity was revoked, and shortly after he resigned from his post in Congress. A few months later, while on his way home, Justice Minister Rodrigo Laura Bonilla was shot by two gunmen on a motorcycle. It was believed to have been retaliation from
the drug cartels. The Colombian president declared war on drug traffickers. He promised to arrest an extradite, all drug traffickers to the United States. Pablo Escobar went into hiding. He was so powerful that he was like, okay, you think I'm hiding? I'm going to show you
that I'm here. So he started this cruel war against everyone, against the government, against the army, the cops, against the judge, every judge, if he needed something and a judge resisted, he would kill the judge, he would kill the journalist, he started this war to pressure Colombian government to not be extradited. In 1985, guerrillas took over the Colombian palace of justice and held 300 people hostage, including the country's Supreme Court justices.
The United States and Colombian governments suspected that the guerrillas were working with Escobar. In the end, after the Colombian army retook the building, a hundred hostages had been rescued, but many had been killed, along with many of the guerrilla fighters. In the 1980s, many officials involved in investigating and prosecuting drug traffickers were killed. In 1987, the New York Times
estimated that 50 judges had been killed because of drug violence. Some Colombian judges resigned in protest, and even more threatened to resign if the government didn't give them more protection. Eventually, Colombia granted anonymity to judges. They were called faceless judges. What did your parents tell you about what was going on? How did they explain it to you? It was complicated. It was complicated because, of course, I was too little. So they didn't say that
much. I knew that we were in a dangerous territory, and I knew it because I saw it. I knew it because I heard the bombs. I remember one night when this huge explosion, this tremendous explosion, blew out the windows of our house. We are surrounded by mountains. So this loud bomb resonated for seconds. Let's say 10 seconds. So it exploded, and then you were inside of it for 10 seconds. I was slipping in the bedroom next to my parents, and I ran to their bed, and I was shaking, and they
were like, don't worry, we're fine, we're fine. Then we went out to the street. After the shock, we went out to the street, and all of her neighbors were coming out of the houses. I remember this woman who had blood on her face because the windows, the glass of the window, cut her. Later, Jorge's family heard that the explosion was from a car bomb at an army base near their
house. People said that the Medellin cartel had put it there. In 1988, Time Magazine reported more than 3,000 people had been murdered in the past year in Medellin, a rate five times higher than in New York City. In 18 hours, the police reported 13 murders. Time called the City of Medellin, the most dangerous in the world. We'll be right back. Support for criminal comms from ritual. I love a morning ritual. We've spent a lot of time at
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I like to wear long sleeves outside so I don't get too much sun. Pack your bags with high quality essentials from quins. Go to quins.com slash criminal for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Spelt Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash criminal to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quins.com slash criminal. In the 1990s, Jorge Carbias' father was a doctor and his mother did x-rays and ultrasound and other
diagnostic tests on patients. Every single day her patients were wounded people, wounded people by gunshots, wounded people by knife, wounded people by bombs, explosions, and my mom has something in her is that she is the best person I know asking questions. Like she can get into intimate conversations in one minute. So she was seeing patients that were hitmen of Pablo Escobar.
She was seeing cops, she was seeing military, she was seeing civilians, and then she would get home and every day at dinner time she would tell me about this hitmen how they were scared when they were doing what they were doing. My mom would reprimand them and they would say like, yes, but there is no alternative for me. If I don't do this, I will also be dead. They would say to her how much they loved their mothers or their children and how what they were doing was
for them. She was seeing how everyone was involved was part of it, either as perpetrators or as victims, but there was no way in managing in the late 80s, early 90s. There was no way to be outside of the conflict. It wasn't possible. When the war began in Medigin, especially with this narcotrophic people and all the bombs started and all the problems in the city that you cannot go anywhere because it was a bomb or a shoot shooting something like that.
In what of that bombs my dad died. My mom was also in that bomb, but she didn't get injured. It was only my dad. Gina Serena was 14 years old. After her father died, her family sold their farm in the country. The oldest of four siblings. I had to help my mom with my brother and my two sisters. For me, it was like how do you say I did not see my family again. My family was with my dad. That was my feeling. When my dad was gone, my feeling of having a family disappear.
Did you, were you still after you died? Really interested in animals? Did that change at all? What were you like as a teenager? I think that's why I decided to study philosophy. Because my interest in animals like disappear. Well, I love animals, but it was not like that time when I was little. I was a little bit rebel, punk-rock-rable. He can say like that. In 1989, a Colombian presidential candidate named Luis Carlos Galón was shot and killed.
A group called the Extra-Dietables said, now the fight is with blood, and that they planned to continue targeting Colombian officials. The Extra-Dietables were drug traffickers, including Pablo Escobar, who had declared total war on the Colombian government unless they outlawed extradition. They said, we prefer a grave in Colombia to a prison in the United States. Less than a month later, a van parked next door to the offices of the newspaper
LS Back to Door exploded. The explosion left a 10-foot deep crater in the street. One person was killed, and 80 people were wounded. In November, a passenger plane flying from Bogota to Cale exploded just after takeoff. TV and radio news stations received calls that said the Extra-Dietables were responsible for both bombs. In 1990, police and medalline estimated that over 4,600 people had been murdered in the city, and that many had been killed because of
violence related to the cartels. The next year, Pablo Escobar began speaking with a priest. He said he might be willing to surrender under certain conditions. In June of 1991, the Colombian government rewrote the country's constitution to make extradition illegal. A few hours later, Pablo Escobar turned himself in. He said he would go to jail, but he wanted it to be a jail that he had built. That jail was called the Cathedral.
The Cathedral was apparently a jail, like a very high security jail, but inside of it, it was just another mansion for Pablo Escobar, where he could do whatever he wanted and where he controlled everyone, even the militaries that were supposedly guarding him. He was there for some months, and there were some scandals in those months because he was bringing friends,
he was bringing prostitutes, he was bringing anything he wanted, it was like his house. So, when this scandal became so big for the government that Pablo Escobar was living in luxury, they tried to move him to a regular prison, and the day that the operation was meant to happen, to move him to another prison, he escaped, of course. I remember that's the year when I started remember things more clearly for years old, and I remember that there were helicopters all day long
on the city. There were strong military presence on the streets, you would see on the news, these advertising, we are, it wanted, and you would see Pablo Escobar picture, and they were offering those mil millones of pesos, which is like 2,000,000 pesos. Pablo Escobar had been on the run for 16 months, when the Colombian government traced phone calls from him to a building in the middle of Medellín. His family had tried to
seek political asylum in Germany, but had been turned away. Pablo Escobar had been trying to pressure the government to provide protection for his family in exchange for his surrender. Colombian Special Forces shot Pablo Escobar on the roof of the building where he had been hiding. He was killed December 1993, and that day, I remember that day, it was the craziest thing in the city,
because it showed how fractured we were as a city. In part, like in the middle class, in the high class neighborhoods, people started shouting and with joy, they killed Pablo Escobar, they killed him, and people were celebrating, people felt that they had been freed of this monster, of this
threatening presence that had made their life impossible for a decade. So there was a huge celebration, I was in that part of the city, but the other part of the city, the neighborhoods that were excluded systematically by the state, those neighborhoods were crying, literally crying, because they had killed Pablo Escobar. And on his funeral, you can watch the videos on his funeral, there are thousands of people crying next to his body, next to the case, because he was loved,
he was loved by many. What did you think when you heard that Escobar was killed? I have that not in my memory. I don't know in what moment, my mind decided that all the narcotropic war they had out of my system. So I don't remember that, I don't remember when the war finished. I really didn't care about that because it was like really painful for me. Actually, I don't see movies or serious or read books about narcotropic or Pablo Escobar or drugs. I'm not interested in that.
35 years after Time Magazine called Medellin the most dangerous place in the world, in 2023, they called it one of the greatest places to visit in the world. Jorge still lives there. What is the city like today? Imagine it's a city that is extraordinary in its transformation. I still can't believe it. I have been here most of my life. Millions of dollars were invested in great public transportation, public transportation that allowed neighborhoods that were pretty far away and that were pretty
different in income to be connected. They did that by investing a lot in parks, in neighborhoods that were very disadvantaged. They did that by investing in libraries. So the investment in the urban design of the city that lasted from the early 2000s to let's say 2012, 2014 was what made Medellin known today as a city that changed itself, that transformed itself and that became a real city, a city that has been struggling to understand what happened. That's still
an issue. That's still something that it's in the process because many people don't want to go back to see those years and remember those years and analyze or interpret those years and to understand the history of the city. I mean does it still feel like his city? Yeah, I do think that Pablo Squad is still very present imagine. You will see it in stickers, in the street in graffiti, everywhere. In the most popular neighborhoods, he is kind of a god.
Like I don't know if you go to Buenos Aires, you will see Maradona or you will see Messi in Argentina as semi-gots. Well, that's Pablo Squad, Medellin. Of course, all this tourism has arrived because the city, there's a lot, there are a lot of drugs and Medellin is still there, Medellin is still a city that has a deep connection with drug trafficking and all those problems. Or he started noticing ads for something called Narco tours, promising to tell the story of
Pablo Escobar. Some let you hike Pablo Escobar's escape route from jail. Some are run by a man known as Popeye, one of Pablo Escobar's hitmen. A few years ago, Jorge decided to go and want himself. It was me and a German tourist. It was only two of us and it was a driver and a woman, both of them, said that they had worked with Pablo Escobar. And they took us first to Adifizio Monaco, which is the building that he built in the heart of El Polado, the richest neighborhood where he lived with his
family. And it was the building where the first car bomb exploded in Medellin because the first car bomb exploded next to the building because they wanted to kill Pablo Escobar and his family. So they took us to that building, which was empty by the time there was nothing there. So we were not able to get in. We were just like park outside of the street watching an empty
wide building. And they were telling all the stories, the woman and the driver were telling all the stories about Pablo Escobar and all the money he had and all the cars that he had on the end of the parking lot. Then they took us to the cathedral to that jail. And it was funny because that jail in 2018 was a nursing home for all people. So they took us there. And the first thing I saw when they took us there was a sign on the parking lot saying, do not believe what the tourist
guides are telling you if you need real information come to the administration. So the nursing home was so tired of people going to their place to listen to the most outrageous lies that they were like, if you really want information, just come to us. After Pablo Escobar was killed, the Colombian government had to figure out what to do with his estate, including the zoo. While
Pablo Escobar was alive, the government would sometimes raid the zoo. Once they confiscated the zebras that lived there, he bribed a guard to let him take the zebras back in exchange for 12 donkeys that had been painted black and white. The government relocated many of Escobar's animals to zoos, but they left the hippos. They lived hippos in the lake because hippos were really difficult to manage. They are really aggressive. They killed people. I think they thought they are
going to die. And 10 years later when they called the local environmental office to go and see what is happening there, they saw there was like a small population of hippos. They reproduced them and then they started to spread out all over the region. We'll be right back. The Greenlight Support for criminal comes from Greenlight. Greenlight is a debit card and money app for families where parents can keep an eye on children spending and money habits while the kids learn how to save,
invest and spend wisely. Thanks to games that teach money skills in a fun, accessible way. The Greenlight app also includes a chores feature where you can set up one time or recurring chores, customized your family's needs and reward kids with allowance. I was so incredibly shy when I was a little girl that my mother would give me a nickel for each time I was willing to walk up to a stranger and say, I'm Phoebe, then I'd use the money to buy candy. Millions of parents and kids
are learning about money on green light. Sign up for green light today and get your first month free when you go to greenlight.com slash criminal. That's greenlight.com slash criminal to try green light for free. Greenlight.com slash criminal. What if you could remember everything? Everything you said, everything you did, everything other people said and did around you, everything you ate, everything
you watched, everywhere you went, what if you could remember all of it? On this episode of the Vergecast brought to you by Metta, we explore how AI might make that possible and what it might mean to be a person in a world where nobody forgets anything ever again. That's the Vergecast anywhere you get podcasts. Gina Palo Serna says after her second year of college, she decided she
wanted to become a vet after all. In 2013, when Gina finished school, she started working at a government environmental office on conservation of big cats like jaguars and pumas. Bad, the Magdalena, maybe a region where these animals are also the region where the hippos are. They told me like you are in the zone like please see where they are, how they are moving, where they can you find them. So I started like to see how these animals move, well, etc. Gina
set up trail cams to see where the hippos lived and how they behaved. It's like hippopotamus here. They have water and food all year long, they have no predators and people love them so. They can do whatever they want. At night, they go out and they eat. They are looking for food. So imagine a three tons hippo going out of the water, eating grass so they compact the floor. So now we have some sites around the legs that we cannot see a grass or you can see nothing because the
the it's so compact that nothing can grow. The displays animals there from our country, wildlife animals like the Manatee, where the hippos are because they are so territorial, the Manatees decided to go all to other place because of the hippos are all day in the water. They do all the natural things in the water. So the feces, imagine 10 or 20 animals in a lake doing feces
all day. So the quality of the water go really really low. So all the fishes and all the animals they are all around this lake die and also all the birds that go and take fishes for food go to other lake because they are no fishes. So there's a lot of problems for the environmental. They are really really aggressive. They attack people. So in some regions of Colombia, for example, the Magdalena River, they destroyed all the boats where the locals go to fish. So there's a really
really big risk for the families, for the children. Some of the hippos were still living at Hossie and Anopolis years later. Some families who had lost their homes during the war were given places to live on the estate. One man said the hippos, quote, used to be nice and tame. Now they are wild. The government also turned part of the estate into a theme park. They put up a sign that warned people to stay in your vehicle after 6 p.m. hippopotamus is on the road. But some of the
hippos had followed the Magdalena River and made homes miles away. In 2009, the government declared the hippos in the area of Porto Barrio, a town 80 miles from Hossie and Anopolis, a danger to the people living there. They'd killed several baby cows and destroyed crops. The environmental ministry approved an order for a special hunt of the hippos. That summer, the Colombian army and professional hunters killed one. He was known as Pepe. When photos of soldiers posing with Pepe's
body appeared in the news, there was a public outcry. People in the area said they considered him a neighbor. They said he would spend his mornings in the river and his afternoon's grazing. One resident said he was a beauty. Then a judge ruled that the Colombian government had to stop hunting hippos. But they could stop them from reproducing. They decided to try to sterilize the hippos. Gina was one of the vets who had to figure out how to do it. They asked me what do I think we can do
if we can start to sterilize them. We can try it. Then we started to capture them. To capture the hippos are not easy. You have to take it to a bomba and then or a coral. Then you can do all the procedures there. But it's not easy. Hippos are the most difficult animal to put in anesthesia in the wildlife. Gina talked to veterinarians in Africa to get advice. She asked if they'd ever sterilize the hippo. All the vets in Africa told me why. They said because I cannot kill them.
No, are you crazy? So we started to do these procedures. They're really risky and they cost a lot of money. After tracking the hippos, Gina would set up corals with food the hippos liked. Once the hippos were inside, the corals would be shot. They have this automatic door when the hippo is inside the closed door and it's really high so they cannot jump. When they are in the moment and the corals, you cannot be by the door because they start to fight with the door to try to get out.
Because hippos are so large, the surgeries have to happen wherever the hippos are caught. So we have to do all the surgeries in the open field. I have to take all my people there. We have to take all the instruments in the open field. We don't have electricity. We don't have like portable water. So we have to take everything there. And so it's a lot of people and a lot of the medications are really, really expensive because we don't have animals of that size in Colombia. So for us, it's like
the double of difficult to do that here. And how long does the actual surgery take? Is it a difficult surgery? It is a male. Only the surgery is like three hours, three or four. If it's a female, it's like five or six hours. To do a surgery in a female, it's really difficult because most of the time you are cutting all the skin and then the muscles to go inside where you can find all the organs. So they have a really, really big skin. And then you have to stay with the hippo until he's
up in his four feet and then he's in four paws, sorry. And he's really, really alert because you cannot liberate a hippo that is still processing the anesthesia because he can he can drop. Gina estimates that each surgery cost about $10,000 and that catching and operating on and releasing a fully recovered hippo takes about three days. But you have to prepare the procedure. So it's weeks of work, weeks of following them with the trail cameras and then putting the food in the
corral so they can get it for one surgery. It's like two months of work. Everything is difficult, expensive in hippos. Naivement and I tell you why it's difficult and expensive. Every time I'm saying, this is the last time. Why are we doing this? This is not the solution. They are keep growing. The population is keep growing. Everyone knows that hippos are Pablo Escobar hippos, right? Like there is no, whenever people talk about hippos, Pablo Escobar
comes after every couple months. A new story comes up and of course, the hippopotamus of Pablo Escobar. Pablo Escobar hippopotamus. So yes, everyone knows that this is a problem that started with him and it's interesting because these are animals that are huge, that are powerful, that are voracious. These are animals that are into hiding, right? They're not easy to detect. They attack from nowhere and somehow they are like his echo, right? They are like
his resonance on Colombia. This somehow is like you cannot forget me. I am always there and it's fascinating that we still don't know what to do. The Colombian government is hoping to sterilize 40 hippos a year. They're also considering relocating some of the hippos to sanctuaries and zoos in Mexico, India and the Philippines. In 2023, Gina stopped working with hippos. She now works for Pantera, an organization working on big cat conservation in Colombia. Do you think you're
really done with hippo surgeries now or do you? Yeah, I don't want to. Is it harder to catch a hippo or a jaguar? A jaguar. Harder. It's harder, yeah. But you'd rather do it. You'd rather be catching a jaguar than a hippo. Yeah. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, Lena Silicin and Megan Canaine.
Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Seminetti. Special thanks to Stan Alcorn. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at ThisIsCriminal.com. Jorge Caraballo reported an episode about Narco tours for the podcast Radio Ambulante. You can listen at Radioambulante.com. And you can sign up for a newsletter at ThisIsCriminal.com slash newsletter. We hope you'll join our new membership program Criminal Plus. Once you sign up,
you can listen to criminal episodes without any ads. And you'll get bonus episodes with me and criminal co-creator Lauren Spore too. To learn more, go to ThisIsCriminal.com slash plus. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show, an Instagram at Criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media podcast network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
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