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The pandemic exhibits dictatorship states

HDP
Forfatter: Sabina Berman
Forlag: Planeta, (Mexico)
LATIN AMERICA / Mexican Sabina Berman's novel, HDP, is self-experienced from the interior of a mega-group. In a Latin America with 9 percent of the world's population, and 32 percent of the world's covid 19 dead.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

The theme is not new: the greedy and inhumane neoliberal world order, which, especially in the third world like Latin America, degrades the living and working conditions of the majority. And as the global covid-19 pandemic only worsens.

Mexican author, playwright and journalist Sabina Berman shows in her latest book, HDP, how an ultra-rich businessman, Hugo David Meadow, is at the forefront of a multinationally successful but ruthless enterprise that benefits from hundreds of thousands of people's manpower and collaboration. The indignation over the state of the world has characterized Sabina Berman's works since she was a young feminist in the late 1960s. HDP is an elegant manufacture of the world's polished floors reserved for a small elite of billionaires or trillionaires. HDP is in Spanish the abbreviation for hijo de puta – son of a bitch – which both in the novel but also in the real world for Sabina Berman is this elite world top.

She resigned as a TV host in one of Mexico's largest media groups in protest of the lack of respect for human life intensified during the pandemic in the form of the demand that the most vulnerable workers continue their work – or get fired.

"There are many HDPs in the world, and they have never been as powerful as today and freed from control by other powers, even the political one. My book is based in the real world – personally experienced – where I show how money and only monetary is the religion of this elite. How this religion controls them and not the other way around, but also that many workers in all walks of life live by this religion. Today, money is the parameter of value in everything from health, education to culture, and the rich can buy everything from legal immunity and almost even democracy," says Sabina Berman.

Prado's Mexican group

HDP has spawned a debate in literary circles in Mexico and the rest of Latin America all the way down to Argentina, where the undersigned lives. A debate about the pandemic and the post-pandemic world. The multinational companies are getting more and more free play across national borders, which is a global tendency, from which not even the butter-hole Scandinavia is completely exempt. The betrayal of the labor market and living conditions, such as the apparently increasing insensitivity in the highest financial and political spheres to this betrayal of the world. This law of the jungle where the strong wins over the less strong.

HDP has spawned a debate in these literary circles, because Latin America is precisely the world's most unequal region economically and socially. And because the region has proven to be the world's worst in terms of both health and financial handling of the covid-19 pandemic. The figures for Latin America are brutal: 9 percent of the world's population, 32 percent of the world's covid 19 deaths and an average drop from 2019 to 2021 in GDP of 8 percent.

HDP is trying to show this, in every way, historic crisis for Latin America – via the cynical polished office corridors of Hugo David Prado's Mexican group. Where the insensitivity to the hardships of the historical crisis for millions of people does not exist. On the contrary, the group maintains all offices and its production and logistics processes regardless of the risk of infection for the employees.

Latin America is the world's most unequal region economically and socially.

These postmodern authoritarian times are what Sabina Berman addresses. And what the debate around the book circulates about. That the world today is tragicomic with an ultra-rich elite of businessmen such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Jeff Buzos, who perhaps like Hugo David Prado perceive people as blue or red numbers on the bottom line of the accounts.

Sabina Berman herself has stated in several interviews that "people like Jeff Buzos run an empire, where he, like a modern autocrat, decides everything. And he decided not to close their parcel centers despite the risk of infection. These people, HDPs, profit as a single person from a process that involves and exploits thousands if not millions of people."

Sabina berman

Tragicomic

The book is, in Sabina Berman's words, tragicomic, because the world is today. Literary critics from Mexico in the north to Argentina in the south have received the book with different attitudes. But the debate about the themes in the HDP has exploded, because Latin America has suffered for decades with deteriorating working and living conditions for the vast majority precisely because their financial, economic, industrial and political elites are so corrupt.

Therefore HDP also indirectly poses the question not only to the region's but to the entire world's rulers – and citizens – whether the pandemic is not a symptom of a degraded and inhuman social model, where the whole world has not been lulled to sleep with the neoliberal dogmas and promises after the fall of the Berlin Wall to believe that everyone can have the same economic success and welfare. And purely commercially become an HDP.

Rune V. Harritshøj
Rune V. Harritshøj
Writer living in Buenos Aires.

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