You don’t get a lot of films in which the narrator is a dead hippopotamus.
A little background is useful to understand Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias’ film, Pepe. In the late 1970s, Colombian drug-cartel leader Pablo Escobar illegally imported four hippos, three females and one male, from South West Africa to his private zoo in Colombia.
The film opens with Pepe, the dead hippopotamus, telling about his idyllic life in Africa. As the story progresses, we are introduced to various human characters. These include the contract workers hired to haul this mysterious cargo and the harsh representatives of Escobar, who take charge. The most important human perspective is that of a local fisherman, Esposo (José Andrés Díaz), who encounters Pepe, having no idea what this monster is. Scared to death, he reports to the regional authority, who thinks he is crazy or lying. But then other fishermen back up Esposo’s story.
So what eventually happened to Escobar’s “cocaine hippos”? When Escobar died in 1993, The hippos escaped from his estate and settled in the Magdalena River. Because there were no natural predators in South America, as there were in Africa, the hippos flourished. There are now estimated to be about 200 hippopotami in Colombia.
De Los Santos Arias, in interviews, has made it clear that what happened to the hippos is similar to what happened to slaves, captured in Africa and sent against their wishes to the Americas, where some of them escaped to create their own free communities.
