Hippo’s mysterious death spurs endless spin

Fears that city is behind plans to close national zoo in El Salvador

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 got 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, was outspoken.

“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. WEDNESDAY MAY 31 2017

Before the investigators could finish their work, however, news of more bizarre occurrences trickled out of the zoo. On April 23, five scarlet macaw parrots were stolen. Four 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 on April 10 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 head-first into the fence of its pen.

“It seems that something weird and abnormal is happening at the zoo, but nobody, absolutely nobody, does anything about it,” Ricardo Chacón, editor in chief of El Diario de Hoy, wrote in an April 29 editorial. “This is almost a syndrome.”

The attorney-general’s office seemed to discount the Gustavito murder theory, announcing that the animal died of a pulmonary haemorrhage. “You don’t see ice pick penetration, as was said initially,” one of the prosecutors said, adding that the wounds in Gustavito’s mouth could have come from his own tusks.

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.

“It’s a shame,” said Roxana Romero, 20, as she sat on a bench in front of Gustavito’s empty pen. “On the weekends, this place used to be full. Now that the hippopotamus isn’t here, there aren’t big-name animals anymore.”

Her sister, Veronica, agreed that Gustavito left a giant hole: “He was my favourite,” she said. – Washington Post