Criticism and self-criticism, a tough choice

In his abrupt return to the first division of Brazilian politics, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva did what was expected of him: he defended the vaccine, attacked Jair Bolsonaro and flirted with the center-right wing. If he didn't go any further, that would be OK, but the former president also sent regards to Nicolás Maduro and swore that, in the Workers' Party administration, Petrobras was a model of management. "What about self-criticism?", complain many of those who dream of witnessing Mr. Lula on his knees to confess his sins to the nation.

From the viewpoint of psychology (simplified, in this case), criticism is a public act, while self-criticism has a more private and lonesome character. When we attack, we look outward, usually with the support of the audience - or the cheerleaders, if you prefer. The admission of guilt, on the other hand, reaches our peers, those closest to us, who will probably insist on saying that "it wasn't that serious", that "that's the way things are", that "everything is alright".

To better picture this reasoning, just shift the perspective to the Operation Car Wash investigation - whose seventh anniversary mass will be celebrated this March. Since the messages exchanged between prosecutors became public, the so-called Republic of Curitiba [the city where the operation was headquartered] is expected to show some self-criticism. Even in the Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo task forces (which have already been destroyed), there is not a single prosecutor available to show some self-criticism.

Does anyone expect former Judge Sergio Moro and his Federal Police officers to call a press conference to explain, in a fancy PowerPoint presentation, their plans to investigate Justices of higher courts? Or, who knows, to investigate the manipulation of testimonies of key witnesses?

They all vanished. The concern with a political and judicial counterattack is so big that Mr. Moro, as well as Prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, went so far as to publicly praise Justice Edson Fachin, of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), the one who took away from them the main Operation Car Wash trophy. Still, those statements never went close to self-criticism.

Among the prosecutors, the assessment is that the problem is not theirs. There is a perception that the STF has "become a no man's land" and that the Court's autophagy process reached a new level last week, led by Justice Gilmar Mendes. He certainly disagrees and will probably not be self-critical at...

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