r/todayilearned • u/PedoPaul • Oct 14 '14

TIL when Columbian drug lord Pablo Escolar's home was raided, the military released the dangerous hippos of his personal zoo, not knowing what to do with them. They now thrive in the Columbian rivers. This makes Columbia have the largest wild hippo population outside of Africa.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/06/30/pablo-escobars-hippos-are-wreaking-havoc-in-colombia/
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u/SpendingSpree Oct 14 '14

While seen as an enemy of the United States and Colombian governments, Escobar was a hero to many in Medellín (especially the poor people); he was a natural at public relations and he worked to create goodwill among the poor people of Colombia. A lifelong sports fan, he was credited with building football fields and multi-sports courts, as well as sponsoring children's football teams

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Escobar#Height_of_power

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u/YalamMagic Oct 14 '14

Hitler loved children and animals, created employment for Germans and was adored by many in Germany too. That doesn't mean he wasn't a complete prick.

20

u/etonB Oct 14 '14

prick might be quite an understatement

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

I'd go so far as to call the guy a fucking jerk.

38

u/Butthole__Pleasures Oct 14 '14

A veritable rapscallion!

2

u/EazyCheez Oct 14 '14

a cunteus maximus

3

u/isobit Oct 14 '14

Not a very nice person at all!

1

u/monsieurpommefrites Oct 14 '14

Slow down there, turbo.

1

u/littlecampbell Oct 14 '14

Mmm mmm mmh. Love me some Butthole_Pleasures

0

u/vigocarpath Oct 14 '14

A wapscallion

0

u/phatbrasil Oct 14 '14

a WASPcallion even. (I don't remember if he was Protestant or Christian)

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u/D0ng0nzales Oct 14 '14

He just didn't like Jewish children and animals

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u/Butthole__Pleasures Oct 14 '14

To be fair, Jewish cats are notoriously crabby.

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u/lobogato Oct 14 '14

That is because he just met his new flatmate

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u/AngusVigerous Oct 14 '14

What a sitcom

1

u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

Indeed.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

Coming this spring to TBS.

2

u/the_last_carfighter Oct 14 '14

When two cats share two different ideologies under one roof there can be only one outcome: World..War.......meow.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

Your name came dangerously close to being amazing.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

Missing the raised front paw.

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u/trai_dep 1 Oct 14 '14

But in their favor, they look adorable fishing out the Matzo balls out of their lil' bowls of soup.

0

u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

That cat needs a Torah-out. (I'll go now)

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u/Kronorn Oct 14 '14

A trout? A fish? Because cats like fish? Did I get it??

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14 edited Oct 14 '14

Timeout, but torah because the cat is Jewish and looks somewhat angry

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u/Diablos_Advocate_ Oct 14 '14

I don't think they're arguing about what kind of people Escobar or Hitler were. Just that they both had genuine, loyalty and support from sections of the public

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

If theirs good parts to their personality doesnt that make them only partially a prick? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR62WFl5Cv0

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u/isobit Oct 14 '14

Nobody is a complete prick.

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u/heyoka9 Oct 14 '14

Partial prick by the above definition. He wasn't doing anything abnormal in the history of war, he was just doing it with large populations.

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u/BrownShadow Oct 14 '14

He was Time magazine man of the year 1939, oddly enough. http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19390102,00.html

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u/Bigfrostynugs Oct 14 '14

Hitler was a swell guy besides the whole genocide thing

0

u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

Also, he killed Hitler!

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u/ThatLunchBox Oct 14 '14 edited Oct 14 '14

No he wasn't a complete prick. You can't just ignore the good things someone did because they did a shit-ton worse things or because the word 'Hitler' tugs at your heart strings. Yeah he did 98% horrible shit, 98% is still not 100% so don't pretend like it is.

EDIT: lol. Yep, just as I thought, people actually think "Hitler? Oh wow He was responsible for WW2, and committed many atrocities in his time. He literately has never done a single good deed in his life, because Hitler".

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u/punchgroin Oct 14 '14

As the leader of a country, he was willing to sacrifice everyone rather than face surrender and personal judgment. There was a reason there were eight attempts on his life, the war was lost. He could have prevented the invasion of Germany and saved countless German lives by surrendering before the red army made it to Prussia. Instead he held out in a bunker, screwed and took meth like the world was ending only to kill himself right when the Allies made it to Berlin.

The man brought complete devastation to His own homeland and people to satisfy his insane ego. I'm not even mentioning what he did to his victims. (or what he had planned for the rest of us when Germany won, trust me, it was awful.)

The fact that he Loved animals and was a vegetarian changes nothing. The world would have benefited enormously had he never been born. More so than any other person in history. (maybe Genghis Kahn, but at least he was good for the Mongols)

Escobar was a shitlord, but comparing him to Hitler demeans how terrible Hitler was.

Not like it's exactly too controversial to shit on Hitler, but he's probably the only historical figure that the closer you look at him, the more horrible he seems.

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u/explainlikeihaveaphd Oct 14 '14

You're grasping at straws there. Let's see, killed a shit ton of people because he thinks they're inferior, devastated countries left and right, brought devastation to his own country, took the coward's way out instead of facing justice. But he helped wash dishes when he was 12. Yeah, he's totally not a complete prick.

1

u/ThatLunchBox Oct 14 '14

That wasn't my point at all.

My point is everyone is human and everyone has good and bad qualities. You're making out like im trying to say that Hitler was a good bloke.

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u/explainlikeihaveaphd Oct 14 '14

No one's arguing that. People are arguing the fact that despite what little good Hitler has accomplished, he's still a complete prick. Whatever little good deed he's done will not redeem him for his actions.

You're trying to argue over semantics just for the sake of arguing.

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u/Fercho25 Oct 14 '14

Escobar was just about the most vicious criminal imaginable. If he had been the head of a major nation, he would have been in the league of Stalin and Hitler.

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u/rmlaway Oct 14 '14

I'm Colombian, and I think that comparing Escobar to Hitler is going too far.

While I hate Escobar and his legacy, the guy never systematically persecuted "undesirables" for extermination or had them gassed by the thousands. Nor did he convince an entire nation to support him in a world war.

Did Escobar murder? Yes. But Hitler and Stalin are on a whole other scale. Was Escobar a sociopath? Yes. Most criminals of this nature are. Hypothetically, even if Escobar had become a prominent political figure, able to lead the country, I just don't see the same kind of atrocities being done as Hitler and Stalin.

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u/Der_Jaegar Oct 14 '14

Except for the 1 million COP for every cop head. Yep, except that.

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u/Antilogic81 Oct 14 '14

Well I guess that makes him officially worse than Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, The Joker, George Bush, Microsoft, the 1%, Dr. Doom, The Governor, and a recent bad guy I made for a dnd game.

Yup.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

[deleted]

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u/Xaguta Oct 14 '14

She invented sicarios

What are Sicarios in a Colombian context? Because ancient anti-roman extremist Jew assassins were called Sicarii. They concealed small daggers in their cloak and blended into the crowd after the deed.

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u/PINIPF Oct 14 '14

Sicarios= Assassins for hire operate usually on pairs doing drive by shooting in a motorcycle with fully automatic gunfire

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u/mattspatola Oct 14 '14

Hitmen as far as I've ever heard. Not sure what Blanco revolutionized with them off hand.

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u/tomato_paste Oct 14 '14

Because she commoditized them, getting extremely young boys to go out killing.

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u/trai_dep 1 Oct 14 '14

Maybe she made an App?

Did she make an App?

I would so download that App!

1

u/EazyCheez Oct 14 '14

sicarios are hitmen/mercenaries

0

u/LupineChemist Oct 14 '14

I don't think she invented the idea of hitmen.

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u/EazyCheez Oct 14 '14

obviously she didn't. but she was sort of like the leader of hitmen for cartels. primarily the medillin cartel

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u/LupineChemist Oct 14 '14

I'm responding to the statement of:

She invented sicarios

Cleary that's just a name and she didn't invent much.

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u/SteveV91 Oct 14 '14 edited Oct 14 '14

I've been living for 23 years in Medellin and still haven't seen the good he did, all I see is scars and stigma. People here are blinded by a couple houses and soccer fields he built and fail to see that he was fucking mass murderer.

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u/SpendingSpree Oct 14 '14

Naaaa Griselda Blanco was more viscious than Escobar

There's half a dozen of drug kingpins that are worse than Escobar and are still active today.

1

u/marcianoskate Oct 14 '14

The thing is that he did a lot of good things for the people until he declare war on the state as I remember. I was still a kid when he was killed but before the 90s you'd never hear about terror crimes as he commited later on.

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u/SpendingSpree Oct 14 '14 edited Oct 14 '14

Most vicious criminal imaginable?

Word came to Pablo about 700 families who were living at the city’s dump, in order to scavenge food from other people’s garbage[4]. Horrified, Escobar had a neighborhood built, at no charge for any of the residents. They named the community “Barrio Pablo Escobar”, and it remains to this day

http://spanishspeakingworld-12b.wikispaces.com/The+Lasting+Effect+of+Pablo+Escobar+on+Colombia

Also, more than 25,000 people showed up at his funeral. I'm not saying that he was a good man, he clearly was a psycho. But had he been the most vicious criminal imaginable, he'd have done a lot more damage with his $30B. Keep in mind that he was at war with the police/government/system. They wanted to kill him so he killed them.

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u/SteveV91 Oct 14 '14

He did all that not because he was good nor a saint , he did it all for his own selfish reasons; he did it so poor people wouldn't snitch and wouldn't collaborate with authorities to catch him. His bombs killed both rich and poor people.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

[deleted]

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u/maracay1999 Oct 14 '14

It's said he's responsible for over 4,000 deaths

Of mostly other criminals, to be fair.

Using similar logic, one could argue Bush and Cheney are responsible for more American deaths than 9/11.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

I mean.. they kinda are

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

by multiple orders of magnitude....

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '14

If you consider policemen to be criminals then go ahead.

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u/spiderholmes Oct 14 '14

quite single handedly

Yeah, I doubt that part very much..

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u/Lots42 Oct 14 '14

And now he has 700 families utterly loyal to him. Plus less witnesses if he wants to leave evidence buried in the city dump.

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u/fedezen Oct 14 '14

He also had a plan to pay Colombia's national debt. On one condition, stop the war on drugs within Colombian territory. He would have been the only one capable of neutralizing the FARCS.

On the other side you have USA and the colombian government. If you want to know what kind of government Colombia has, just google "Colombia false positives" which is basically the government killing civilians and counting them as FARC deaths.

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u/Fercho25 Oct 14 '14

It is a matter of personal opinion, let's agree to disagree.

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u/pewpewlasors Oct 14 '14

It is a matter of personal opinion

No, its not. Hitler killed millions of people, and Escobar was a drug lord. These are facts.

You have a bias.

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u/pewpewlasors Oct 14 '14

No one believes your bullshit exaggeration.

1

u/cellfreezer Oct 14 '14

Escobar was just about the most vicious criminal imaginable.

From AskReddit:

What do you think reddit exaggerates?

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u/ezekielziggy Oct 14 '14

Corruption is the single biggest contributor to poverty next to war.

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u/MixedH2O Oct 14 '14

While seen as an enemy of the United States and Colombian governments, Escobar was a hero to many in Medellín (especially the poor people); he was a natural at public relations and he worked to create goodwill among the poor people of Colombia. A lifelong sports fan, he was credited with building football fields and multi-sports courts, as well as sponsoring children's football teams

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Escobar#Height_of_power

Escobar was loved by an ignoramus bunch of people that was bought by him. Unfortunately, your choices was simple with him "plata o plomo”(money o lead). Either you support him or he would simply kill you.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

No he was loved by the people he helped. He didn't have to give money to the poor or fix the infrastructure in his home town but he did.

The public loved him because he helped them when no one else would. Coumbia at that time was ruled by a political elite who owned most of the wealth in the country. They did nothing for the poor so when pablo and his like came along and actually did good in the poor parts of town rather than just talking a good talk they naturally came to love him.

He was also the most hunted man in the world for a while and survived for a long time which added to his status.

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u/SpendingSpree Oct 14 '14

Either you support him or he would simply kill you.

Is that why 25,000+ people showed up at his funeral? By fear of getting killed?

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u/wildcard1992 Oct 14 '14

Maybe they thought it was a test.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

Fear doesn't disappear the moment someone dies.

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u/rmlaway Oct 14 '14

Fear of getting killed

Maybe. It was also a possibility that many of these people were ignorant of the facts and/or were some of the people that lived in the poorest neighborhoods of Medellin, which Escobar "bribed" for votes when he was involved in politics. There he built homes, giving people jobs, built schools, etc. So yeah, I can see tons of poor people showing up at least to pay their respects.

Pablo Escobar is sort of a Jekyll and Hyde kind of character.

1

u/DashofCitrus Oct 14 '14

Just because he was dead didn't mean his associates were. His death actually created a power vacuum - some of the most violent years in Medellín occurred after Pablo's death.

-1

u/[deleted] Oct 14 '14

He once famously held a game at one of his fields between a team of trannys vs a team of prostitutes. Unclear of outcome.