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A Haitian Slanderer

James Morrell, director of the project, 2007-11-28

Haiti Democracy Project web page item #3860 (http://www.haitipolicy.org)

A Haitian journalist and pro-Aristide propagandist, Joseph Guyler C. Delva, has issued a slander against Haiti Democracy Project founder Sen. Rudolph Boulos, accusing him of sending men to intimidate him. This claim is false. Delva has been identified by the former head of the U.S. Information Agency in Haiti as a "Palace information activist." Following are some evaluations of Mr. Delva’s credibility over the years.

Daniel Whitman, counselor for public affairs at the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince in 1999–2001, in his book A Haiti Chronicle: The Undoing of a Latent Democracy, 1999–2001 (Victoria, British Columbia, 2005)

P. 176.

The following day (January 13, 2001), Palace information activist Guyler Delva seized control of the long-dormant Association of Haitian Journalists (AJH), publicly shredding in his hands a copy of its charter at a group gathering, after some of those present questioned the legality of Delva’s self-proclamation as AJH president.

Th Palace had apparently noted the challenge and danger of a truly independent press, now fully organized nationally under a decentralized structure, which stood as institutional impediment to any personality cult. The founding committee had created the Haitian Press Federation (FPH) to have a rotating presidency, giving the lead to each of the nine provinces in turn and prohibiting that any province succeed itself for two terms.

The government was alarmed to see the thriving of a loose confederation of some 2000 journalists country-wide, "not to be bought," while offering up its own AJH which by Delva’s own reckoning had at most one hundred members, all of them residing in the capital.

Shortly after Delva’s coup January 13 at the Hotel Caraibe, he went into high gear, denouncing his own former teacher Ady Jean Gardy and calling for Ambassador Curran’s expulsion from the country, from microphones in Port-au-Prince, Miami and New York.

A couple of genuine candidates for the AJH leadership had withdrawn after receiving credible death threats by phone. Delva’s friend and colleague Pierre Joel Jean agreed to be the straw man at the last minute, resulting in triumphal photos of Jean embracing Delva after Delva’s "victory" as president of the well-funded but largely shunned AJH . . .

Delva’s imprisonment for wife-beating in December of 1999 had drawn public support from only one man—Ady Jean Gardy, who published a letter in Le Nouvelliste by one journalist in defense of another. But now in early 2001, Delva turned against his earlier mentor after seizing the AJH as his plattform for indictments against the independent press in Haiti. Delva’s polemics rose out of frail arguments and scant support amongst Haiti’s rank-and-file journalists, but benefited from financial support from a Palace determined to burnish its image. With Delva the camouflaged lead, they went about reining in the larger stations, or delivering death threats to the holdouts, or a cocktail of both.

As the stakes grew higher and murder became a reality, the independent FPH only gained in strength, even drawing together rival local press associations who understood that an unleashed AJH would mean the end of free expression in Haiti.

Eventually in spring of 2001, even Delva himself had to go into hiding, as the Revolution proceeded to devour its children, every bone and organ of them.

Chronicle

P. 254. December 17, 1999. Journalist Guyler C. Delva, confidante of President Préval and recipient of privileged press leaks from the Palace, is incarcerated for beating his wife, and with rumors of the latter achieving intimacy with the President and being caught in fragrante.

P. 259. April 17, 2000. Palace press employee Guy Delva stages a march for slain Jean Dominique; most radio stations boycott the event because of their mistrust of Delva, and their suspicion that the regime was, itself, to blame for the assassination.

P. 262. June 10, 2000. Palace press employee Guy Delva rallies journalists to silence opponents to the regime.

P. 273. January 13, 2001. Palace information activist Guy Delva seizes control of the Association of Haitian Journalists, goes on the air to support a state law to restrict press freedoms, and advocating that the state prosecute journalists who print "wrong" stories. Delva violates the AJH charter in both leading the search committee for director, then assuming the job himself.

P. 280. April 12, 2001. AJH gangs disrupt a press conference byAmb. Curran in Cap-HaVtien.

P. 281. April 23, 2001. AJH self-appointed Secretary-General Delva smashes Ambassador Curran and me in public statements, for not supporting the AJH.

Robert Ménard, secretary-general of Reporters sans FrontiPres

L’organisation Reporters Sans FrontiPres rompt ses relations avec l’Association des Journalistes HaVtiens

L’Organisation Reporters Sans FrontiPres (RSF) annonce la rupture de toute coopération avec l’Association des Journalistes Haitiens suite au scandale qui a entouré la cérémonie de remise des prix aux reporters le 7 juin B l’Hôtel le Plaza.

Au terme d’une mission de quatre (4) jours en Haiti , le secrétaire général de RSF estime avoir été piégé par le dirigeant de l’Association des Journalistes Haitiens (AJH) . Robert Ménard se dit choqué du fait que le Prix Brignol Lindor ait été décerné B un reporter d’un média qui prenait position en faveur des auteurs du crime crapuleux commis contre notre confrPre de Petit-Goâve.

Le secrétaire général de l’Association des Journalistes HaVtiens (AJH) qui est B l’origine de ce scandale au sein de la coopération dénonce la prise de position de Reporters Sans FrontiPres. Guy Delva tente de faire comprendre qu’il est aujourd’hui critiqué pour des raisons d’ordre politique. M.Delva estime que Robert Ménard s'est laissé emporter par son aversion pour l'ancien président Jean Bertrand Aristide( placé sur la liste des prédateurs de la presse par RSF).

Guy Delva fait l’objet de vives critiques dans les milieux de la presse notamment aprPs cette soirée de remise des prix B des journalistes de différents médias. Le "Prix Brignol Lindor" octroyé par le jury B un journaliste de la Télévision Nationale d’HaVti média qui cautionnait les atteintes graves commises contre la presse indépendante par le régime de Jean Bertrand Aristide a provoqué un scandale.

(Radio Metropole)

Former prime minister Gérard Latortue: "A fabrication"

Le Premier ministre Gérard Latortue dément une information publiée par l'agence Reuters selon laquelle il aurait sollicité l'aide de Jean Bertrand Aristide et serait prLt B envoyer un émissaire en Afrique du Sud. Selon le bureau du Premier ministre, « cette dépLche est une machination éhontée de son correspondant en HaVti, M. Guyler C. Delva qui se base sur une hypothétique entrevue que le Premier ministre aurait accordé B la station de radio Tropic FM. Cette prétendue entrevue n'existe que dans l'esprit de M. Delva qui ne rate d'ailleurs aucune occasion pour faire de la désinformation sur HaVti en prLchant essentiellement pour sa chapelle politique ».Le Premier ministre espPre que de tels agissements ne se reproduiront plus et a profité de l'occasion pour rappeler que la loi sanctionne de tels comportements.

M. Guyler C. Delva a qualifié de farfelue les accusations de la Primature. Il a indiqué avoir fait son travail. (Radio Ginen)

Reuters News Agency

Issued a  retraction of the above story when it was revealed to be without foundation.

Daniel Simidor, New York, N.Y.: "A Lavalas propagandist"

Joseph Guyler Delva’s latest Reuters report on Haiti,
published in Friday’s NYTimes, is one hell of a promo
piece for Lavalas Family - "the largest political
party...of ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and
the poor masses."

Next Delva, whose allegiance to Aristide is pretty up
front, boldly refers to Lavalas as "the party that has
dominated politics for 20 years" - when that party did
not even exist 20 year ago! Indeed the Lavalas
concept only emerged in 1987, in a defiant song of the
TPt Ansanm (Heads Together) peasant choir, "Nou se
Lavalas / N ap pote y’ale" (We are the flood / we’ll
drag them out), following a massacre of peasant
activists in July that year. Aristide, who took part
in a fiery memorial for the victims of the massacre

later that year, would drop the first two lines of the
chorus, "Yo pare pou nou / Ann pare pou yo" (They
[i.e. the class enemy] are prepared against us / Let’s
prepare ourselves against them), only to borrow the
Lavalas mantra as his campaign slogan three years
later. His run for the presidency in the 1990
elections had been under the auspices of the
center-left coalition FNCD. Lavalas Family as a
political party only goes back a decade ago.

Half way down in his article, Delva again tried to
bamboozle his readers. "Aristide, whose movement
forced Jean Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier from power in
1986...," he wrote. Neither Aristide nor "his
movement" played any such role. The epicenter of the
upheaval that led to the demise of the Duvalier
dynasty was in Gonaives, not in Port-au-Prince where
the regime was at its strongest. Aristide played a
minimal role, if any, in Baby Doc’s downfall. Delva
knows this too well. But that knowledge doesn’t stop
him and his fellow Lavalas propagandists, intent on
rewriting Haiti’s recent history to satisfy their
leader’s hegemonic and megalomaniac ambitions.

Delva quite cleverly manages to write about the
hardline "Aristide or Death" wing of Lavalas, without
any mention of that faction’s year-long campaign of
bloodletting violence and lawlessness. He
successfully manipulates Amnesty International’s
latest report on Haiti to make it seem as if Amnesty’s
condemnation of "deliberate and arbitrary killings of
civilians, rape, death threats and intimidation" were
only directed at the interim government. In the
process, Delva managed to publish a priceless
pro-Aristide piece without any negative subtext, the
same week that two devastating administrative reports
issued in Haiti and on the internet were laying bare
the shocking details of rampant and systematic
corruption involving both Aristide’s Foundation for
Democracy and the highest levels of his
administration, throughout the duration of his second
term in office. "Nice work if you can get it." But
that will not stop the Aristide propagandists from
whining that their boss is getting a bad rap in the
mainstream media!
The reports in question are available in plain text at
www.haitipolicy.org.