How Rubber Bands Are Strangely Tied To Pablo Escobar

12,000 years ago, a settlement of ancient humans drew art on stone, depicting the animals they hunted in the Magdalena River Valley in Columbia. Giant sloths, mastodons and various large beasts populate the rock walls, painted in ocre across hundreds or maybe thousands of years.

These Megafauna, giant creatures of a bygone era, are all now extinct. Today elephants are the only large plant eating animals we have left on land. A last remnant of hundreds and thousands of species which died out or which we hunted to extinction for food.

This was 10,000 BCE. Many thousands of years later, north of the Magdalena Valley, the Olmec people bloomed and gave us the magic of rubber. Besides giving us erasers to fawn over as stationery lovers, in the mid 1800s, rubber’s stretchy nature resulted in the first patent for an elastic rubber band as a fastener.

Over the next 100 years, rubber bands developed slowly until in the 1930’s an American manufacturer of rubber started marketing bands made from discarded tyre inner tubes to newspaper companies. They were to protect all those dailies thrown at people’s doors every morning. They also sold them for agricultural use and eventually better ways were invented to make rubber bands, and they became the ubiquitous office supply we know today.

Speaking of business, by the early 1990’s the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar was estimated to be the 7th richest man in the world. The tons of cocaine his organization was shipping abroad every week meant around $400 million earned on a weekly basis.

He’d been growing to this stature since the 1970’s. Very early on he was making more money, all in cash, than they knew what to do with. Cash was stashed everywhere, in warehouses and fields. His brother, the accountant, was spending $2500 a month on rubber bands to hold the bundles of cash together. In spite of this, they were writing off $2 billion (with a B) of cash every year, lost to hungry rats and just to loss. Could you imagine how much more they would have lost without the rubber bands?

With some of those riches he saved from rats, Escobar created a private zoo in his large estate near Medellin. In this zoo were 4 hippos. After the manhunt in 1993 which led to his death, his estate went into neglect and the hippos roamed free and reproduced freely. By the early 2000s there were 40 hippos in and around the estate. By 2018 there are estimated to be over a 100, and their territory now ranges all the way to the Magdalena River, where our story started.

Never underestimate the superpowers of a humble rubber band. Millions of rubber bands are even more potent. Clearly they can do anything, including making a dent in a mass extinction or two.

1. From Secretary to Superwoman – Read about Bette Nesmith Graham, the Inventor of Correction Fluid – https://inkymemo.com/the-secretary-who-invented-liquid-paper/
2. Read about the strange connection between anesthesia, false teeth and the invention of rubber stamps – https://inkymemo.com/the-intriguing-story-of-rubber-stamps/