A former Colombian police major, Juan Carlos Meneses, has come forward to allege that Santiago Uribe, younger brother of President Alvaro Uribe, led a paramilitary group in the 1990s in the northern town of Yarumal, Antioquia department, that killed petty thieves, guerrilla sympathizers and suspected "subversives." In an interview with the Washington Post, Meneses said the group's hit men trained at La Carolina, a ranch owned by the Uribe family, in the early 1990s. "This is what we have been hoping for—that something like this could come out, and we could show what these paramilitary groups were," said María Eugenia López. She said five of her relatives were killed by paramilitaries in Yarumal in 1990.

On May 16 European and Latin American social movements meeting in Madrid adopted a statement denouncing the US and European response to a devastating Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti as "the utilization of the humanitarian alibi with the sole goal of defending US geopolitical, economic and military interests, with the complicity of the European Union (EU)." The groups were meeting in the Fourth Assembly of Enlazando Alternativas (EA4, "Linking Alternatives"), held May 14-18 on the eve of a May 18 trade summit of EU and Latin American and Caribbean leaders in the Spanish capital. Haiti, which signed an economic partnership agreement with the EU in 2009, was expected to attend the summit.

On May 18 union leaders in the All Puerto Rico for Puerto Rico Coalition claimed success for a 24-hour general strike they held that day to support students striking against a proposed $100 million cut in the budget of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). The unionists said their members had shut down nine of the country's 10 government centers, along with port operations in San Juan. Marcos Rodríguez-Ema, secretary for Gov. Luis Fortuño, denied the unionists' claims, saying government offices were operating normally. The Cuban wire service Prensa Latina reported that traffic in the capital was greatly reduced, while the Spanish wire service EFE called the situation normal.

Five participants in an open-ended hunger strike by dozens of laid-off Mexican electrical workers were taken to the hospital on May 21 and 22 as the protest reached the four-week mark. About 68 hunger strikers remained camped out in Mexico City's main plaza, the Zócalo, in the workers' latest protest against President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa's sudden liquidation of the government-owned Central Light and Power Company (LFC) the night of Oct. 10. More than 17,000 of the 44,000 laid-off LFC workers, represented by the 95-year-old Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), have rejected the government's severance package, choosing to fight the closing with protests and lawsuits.

Running battles between police and gunmen of the Shower Posse gang turned part of Jamaica's capital Kingston into a warzone on May 24, with reports of explosions and civilian casualties. Two police were killed the previous day as police moved in to arrest accused kingpin Christopher "Dudus" Coke for extradition to the US. The confirmed death toll has now reached three, as a soldier was killed breaking through street barricades in the Tivoli Gardens neighborhood. National Security Minister Dwight Nelson said on national television that he had received reports of several civilian deaths and desperate pleas from residents pinned inside buildings by gunfire. Police and soldiers have begun house-to-house searches for Dudus Coke.

A state of emergency has been declared in southern Kyrgyztsan following what authorities are portraying as ethnic violence. On May 19, several thousand ethnic Kyrgyz tried to storm a private university in Jalal-Abad that serves as a center of the minority Uzbek community, sparking a clash that left at least two people dead and more than 70 wounded. Witnesses said gunfire broke out as crowds approached the building encircled by a cordon of special security forces. It was not clear who opened fire, but health officials said most of the injured appeared to be from the crowd. Many see an effort to restore ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiyev behind the outburst.

The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) announced May 22 that it has launched an investigation into the shootings of dozens of prisoners during a jail riot in Les Cayes, the country's third city, following the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake. Haitian police had blamed fighting among inmates for the deaths. Thousands of prisoners escaped from jails in Haiti in the chaos after the quake that killed more than 200,000.

Even as the disaster unfolds in the Gulf of Mexico, lawyers for BP and federal regulators are working to settle a civil suit the government brought in connection with the 2006 pipeline spills in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay oilfield. In papers BP and government lawyers jointly filed in US District Court in Anchorage recently, the two sides said they had "conducted extensive settlement discussions including...exchanging several drafts of various settlement constructs." Judge John Sedwick granted a motion to extend deadlines related to expert witness disclosure and discovery until near the end of the year.