Opinion | Why Colombia’s president should talk to Biden about cocaine hippos

He could have gone further. He could have pointed out that humanity has used drugs ever since records of our history exist, and no law or prohibition will change that. If he were in a philosophical mood, he might have argued that such an ingrained inclination of the human psyche can hardly be addressed through policing.

The problem with those talking points is that they have been argued countless times already. And they have been rejected from the very beginning. The U.S. war on drugs, launched by President Richard M. Nixon in 1971, seemed to achieve its greatest success in the 1990s. It succeeded in dismantling the so-called Cali and Medellín cartels in Colombia, the first major criminal organizations dedicated to drug trafficking.

But was that a real victory? The cartels were almost immediately replaced by better — or rather worse — players. In Colombia, paramilitary and insurgent organizations entered the trade, while new Mexican cartels picked up the global mantle dropped by their imprisoned or dead former colleagues.

None of these failures dissuaded U.S. policymakers. Instead, they doubled down in 2000 with Plan Colombia, a program to support a Colombian militarized response with resources and training. That effort killed 450,000 people, left more than 120,000 missing and displaced millions more, all without fully eradicating the trafficking groups. Petro knows this well, as he is trying to broker peace with them today.

Indeed, the United States counted all this as a success. In 2007, it launched the Mérida Initiative — let’s call it Plan Mexico — another multibillion-dollar war, this time against the Mexican cartels. It, too, led to hundreds of thousands of additional homicides and at least 79,000 people missing.

No matter the evidence, the United States seems unable to change course. Petro might be tempted to blast this stubbornness as hypocrisy: the hypocrisy of, say, forcing Latin American peasants to eradicate crops of poppy, cannabis or coca leaves they can’t replace with anything equally valuable, while looking the other way on Afghan poppy cultivation — even as the Sackler family continued to freely sell opioids with FDA approval.

Or maybe it is that the war on drugs has successfully served a different purpose. Abroad, the United States has used drug diplomacy as a foreign policy weapon since the days of Theodore Roosevelt and U.S. colonialist ventures in the Philippines; in the United States, it has led to a mass incarceration of people of color.

Of course Petro can no longer say this. He is no longer a young guerrilla fighter. So maybe he should try something different.

He should tell the story of the hippos of the leader of the Medellín Cartel, Pablo Escobar — the archetype of the Latin American “narco” popularized by Hollywood. In his hacienda, Nápoles, Escobar had built an exotic zoo featuring swans, giraffes, gazelles, zebras, kangaroos, lions, tigers — and a couple of hippopotamuses, smuggled into the country in a huge Hercules transport plane in the 1980s.

After Escobar was killed by Colombian forces supported by the United States in December 1993, the hippos escaped through a river and became the first of its species to live freely on the new continent. They had no predators, so they have multiplied — there are now 169 at last count. They appear by surprise in towns and on beaches, cause accidents, and scare the local fishermen, nutria, manatees and capybaras. Weighing up to three tons and able to move as faster than 18 miles per hour, they are like small living tanks. They were declared an invasive species in February 2022. If nothing is done about them, there will be more than 400 in a few years.

But what is to be done? In 2009 two German hunters killed Pepe, the male in the original couple, and caused an uproar. Animal rights defenders reject the mere notion that the hippos need to be put down. Petro has agreed with them in the past, but a recent scientific report suggested there might be no other choice, at least to reduce the population. Others have suggested relocating them to zoos in Mexico or India, or even sending them back to Africa. But who is going to pay for it? Colombia has enough troubles as it is. The United States, which has not cared about the human toll of its drug policy?

“Please, President Biden,” Petro might ask. “Tell me, who is going to take care of Escobar’s hippos?”