During the last week of May the government of Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina began a process that human rights defenders charge will virtually close down the Peace Archives, the agency in charge of preserving and investigating military and police records from the country's bloody 1960-1996 civil war. Newly appointed Peace Secretary Antonio Arenales Forno announced that the agency was unnecessary. Its function, he said, is "to computerize and analyze military archives to establish human rights violations, but this is the responsibility of the human rights community, and the investigation of crimes is the responsibility of the Prosecutor's Office."

The body of indigenous teacher and activist Teódulo Santos Girón was found on May 16 in the town cemetery in La Ticla in the western Mexican state of Michoacán. According to official sources, Santos Girón, who had just finished his term as a local official in the indigenous Nahua community of Santa María Ostula, had been kidnapped in La Ticla the night before; he was shot in the head and in the body.

Former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto is still favored to win Mexico's July 1 presidential elections, but polls released at the end of May showed his lead over the other candidates slipping. After being considered the certain winner for months, Peña Nieto, the candidate of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was only four percentage points ahead of former Mexico City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador in a poll published by the conservative daily Reforma on May 31. Peña Nieto led voter intentions with 38%, according to Reforma, down from 45% in March; López Obrador, who is running with a center-left coalition, followed closely with 34%, up from 22% in March; and Josefina Vázquez Mota, the candidate of the governing center-right National Action Party (PAN), came in third with 23%, down from 32% in March.

More than 100 people claiming to be former members of the disbanded Armed Forces of Haiti (Fad'H) marched to Port-au-Prince from Carrefour, on the capital's southwestern outskirts, on May 18 to mark Haiti's Flag Day. They were wearing combat fatigues and some were armed. A few admitted to a reporter that they were too young to have been in the military in 1995 when it was disbanded by then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996, 2001-2004); others were women, even though the Fad'H had been all male. The marchers were calling on the government of President Michel Martelly ("Sweet Micky") to restore the old military.

The body of Honduran journalist Angel Alfredo Villatoro Rivera, a reporter and news coordinator for the HRN radio chain, was found in Tegucigalpa on the evening of May 15, six days after he was kidnapped while driving to work. He had been shot twice in the head, according to Security Ministry spokesperson Héctor Iván Mejía; local media reported that the body was dressed in a police uniform. (EFE, May 15 via Univision)

Private and public university students sponsored a massive march in Mexico City on May 19 to protest media coverage of the July 1 presidential and legislative elections and the widely expected victory of former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto, the presidential candidate of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The marchers also rejected the candidate of the center-right National Action Party (PAN), Josefina Vázquez Mota, who shares second place in most polls with center-left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Tens of thousands of Chilean students demanding education reform held their second large national demonstration of the 2012 school year on May 16, continuing a movement that shut down many of the country's secondary schools and universities with a strike last year. Protesters marched in Santiago, Valparaíso, Concepción, Copiapó and other cities; student leaders estimated the total turnout nationwide at about 100,000.

Groups in Argentina, Brazil, France, England, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and the US are planning events in the May 15-22 "Week of Global Struggle for the Liberation of Alberto Patishtán Gómez and Francisco Sántiz López," two indigenous prisoners from the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas. The week of actions was initiated by the New York-based Movement for Justice in El Barrio.