What killed this famous hippo?
Late one Sunday night in February, El Salvador’s secretary of culture alerted the world to a “cowardly and inhumane attack.” The perpetrators had used “severe and overwhelming blows.” A beloved national figure was gone.
Gustavito, the lone hippopotamus at the National Zoo of El Salvador, had been killed.
It takes a lot to shock El Salvador, one of the world’s most violent countries, but Gustavito’s death had done it. Tens of thousands of mourners streamed into the zoo, a leafy enclave in southern San Salvador, to pay their respects. The bereaved held candlelit vigils. When the environment secretary addressed reporters, she was in tears. Had gang violence gotten this out of control? “Forgive us, Gustavito,” one resident tweeted, reflecting the national shame.
Within a couple of days, however, the first cracks appeared in the official story. Had Gustavito actually been stabbed in the snout by vicious assailants using an ice-pick-like weapon, as zoo director Vladlen Henriquez alleged? Or did the hippo get sick several days before, as anonymous zoo workers leaked to the local media, then lose the ability to eat and, with poor medical care, fall onto some sharp parts of his enclosure?
Ricardo Amaya, the union boss for the zoo workers, could smell one thing.
“There is negligence here by the zoo director and the veterinarians,” he told reporters.
These initial suspicions soon twisted into more elaborate ones. Was Gustavito’s death part of a conspiracy to shutter the zoo, pushed by shadowy business interests who want to build some mega-project on the property? The El Salvador attorney general’s office was called in to investigate.
Before the investigators could finish their work, however, news of more bizarre occurrences trickled out of the zoo. In April, five scarlet macaw parrots were stolen. Days later, an 8-year-old puma, Soberana, died of intestinal trouble, the same day that a spider monkey drowned in a pond.
Perhaps the strangest incident took place, also in April, when the zebra died. Zoo authorities explained that an earthquake struck in the middle of a heavy rain, presumably spooking the zebra so much that it ran headfirst into the fence of its pen.
The attorney general’s office seemed to discount the Gustavito murder theory, announcing that the animal died of a pulmonary hemorrhage. “You don’t see icepick penetration, as was said initially,” one of the prosecutors said.
San Salvador Mayor Nayib Bukele finds the zoo’s explanations of its mysterious deaths even less credible. After Gustavito died, Bukele proposed closing the zoo and relocating all 600 of the animals to a wildlife sanctuary in Mexico.
“The zoo here . . . it’s depressing,” Bukele said in an interview. “We have a lion that has eaten his own tail. I’m not joking. Literally, he ate his tail.”
Born in captivity in 2002 at a zoo in Guatemala, the hippo was purchased for $5,000 by the El Salvador zoo two years later. When the zoo’s elephant died in 2010, Gustavito was the main remaining attraction.
“He was famous,” one zoo custodian said. “Famous like Madonna.”