A slice of Pablo Escobar’s once-lavish ranch – a symbol of the drug lord’s enormous wealth and home to his infamous “cocaine hippos” – is being given to women who suffered in Colombia’s armed conflict, announced Gustavo Petro, the president.
Escobar, Colombia’s most notorious narco-trafficker and former head of the powerful Medellín cartel, became one of the richest men in the world in the late 1980s, with Forbes magazine estimating his fortune at $25bn.
He invested some of that wealth in decking out his Hacienda Nápoles estate in northwest Antioquia. As well as filling it with classic cars and exotic animals – zebras, giraffes and kangaroos as well as the hippos – he installed an airstrip, various swimming pools and a 1,000-seat bull ring. On top of the entrance gate, Escobar also mounted a replica airplane, modeled on the one he allegedly used for his first cocaine shipment to the United States.
After Escobar was killed in a rooftop shootout with security forces in Medellín in 1993, his playground was abandoned and fell into disrepair. It was later taken over by the state and leased to local authorities, who for a while opened it as a theme park.
Now, part of the estate has been repurposed again, and given to victims of Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict.
“We have begun to recover the Nápoles estate for the victims,” Petro wrote on social media on Wednesday.
The government has said that 120 hectares of the land has been given to local female farmers. Felipe Harman, director of the National Land Agency, called the decision “a historic victory for the women who never stopped fighting”.
“It is an immense joy to finally celebrate,” said Millinery Correa, one of the beneficiaries, in a video shared by the state-run National Land Agency. “I feel very happy because today there are women who have hope, who have land for life.”
Land disputes have long driven instability in Colombia, with drug traffickers and guerrillas forcibly evicting farmers to expand their territory and cultivate coca, the plant used to produce cocaine.
Laura Bonilla, deputy director of the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation (PARES), said that Escobar “bought and seized” the land and sought to make it an “empire almost completely independent from Colombia, with its own laws and even its own ecosystem”.
In May, Petro, the country’s first leftist president, proposed returning part of the land to farmers. “That hacienda has so many deaths that it must be returned to the people,” he said, adding that the land’s “genuine owners” were the rural farmers.
But some local residents and business owners opposed the plan, arguing it threatened the local economy; the theme park attracts more than 1 million tourists annually. A protest later saw about 1,500 people block the Medellín-Bogotá highway.
Despite the opposition, the plan has now been set in motion. “What president Petro did on 1 October was to give back the land, and also the dignity, to those who had lost everything,” Bonilla said.
Despite the donation of the land, the growing population of feral hippos roam on, trampling crops and attacking nearby villages – a last corner of Escobar’s empire that has yet to be contained.
