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.

Reports from Mali's breakaway northern region of Azawad are as murky and contradictory as ever. Last week we were told that the Tuareg rebels of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) had cut a deal with the largest jihadi faction in the region, Ansar Dine, for creation of an "Islamic state." Now a May 29 AFP report picked up by Nigeria's This Day and South Africa's IOL News quotes a Tuareg rebel leader as saying the deal has collapsed. But the leader is named as speaking not in the name of the MNLA, but a "National Liberation Front of Azawad (FNLA)." To wit:

A new law granting Israeli authorities the power to detain "illegal migrants" for up to three years took effect June 3, following a wave of Tel Aviv protests over the influx of African migrants who cross into Israel along its border with Egypt. The law even makes asylum seekers liable to imprisonment—without trial or deportation—if caught staying in Israel for long periods. Additionally, anyone found to be aiding migrants or providing them with shelter could face up to 15 years in prison. The law amended the Prevention of Infiltration Law, passed in 1954 to prevent the entry of Palestinians.

An Egyptian court on June 2 found former president Hosni Mubarak guilty of complicity in the killing of protesters during last year's uprising and sentenced him to life in prison. The court also found former Interior Minister Habib al-Adli guilty of the same charge and sentenced him to a life term. But corruption charges were dropped against Mubarak's sons, Alaa and Gamal. And six senior security officials, including former head of the now-disbanded State Security Investigations service (SSI), were acquitted. During the protests that resulted in the overturning of his 33-year regime, Mubarak ordered government officials to use gunfire and other violent measures to subdue demonstrations, resulting in some 850 deaths. Mubarak's 10-month trial marks the first time a former Arab leader has been held accountable for his actions in a court of law.

UK-based indigenous rights advocacy group Survival International warns that Peru's government has drawn up "secret plans" for a natural gas exploration bloc in the Kugapakori Nahua Nanti Territorial Reserve, in what it calls a "flagrant violation" of laws that protect "uncontacted" Amazon tribes within such reserves. The existence of the bloc was first revealed in the April 5 edition of the Lima weekly Caretas, in an article about the Camisea gas project in the lowland rainforest of Cuzco region. While the text of the article didn't mention the new bloc, an accompanying map shows a "Fitzcarrald Bloc" lying immediately to the east of the Camisea consortium's Bloc 88. The map doesn't show the reserve, but Bloc 88 already superimposes the western edge of the reserve—to the protests of environmentalists and indigenous advocates. Survival writes that if confirmed, the Fitzcarrald Bloc "will cut the Nahua-Nanti Reserve in half, and put uncontacted tribes' lives in immediate danger."

An "indefinite" paro (civil strike) was initiated in Cajamarca, Peru, on May 31 to oppose the pending mega-scale Conga gold mine, with thousands-strong marches held in the regional capital. Hundreds of National Police troops were mobilized to the streets, and on June 1 a new march was met with a police charge and even fired shots. The violence broke out when police in full riot gear attempted to clear an open-air kitchen that a group of women had established on a traffic island in one of the city's main thoroughfares to feed the protesters. Although the incident won little media attention, video coverage posted on YouTube appears to show two shots being fired, followed by a woman crying out and collapsing on the pavement. The sparse media coverage did not indicate anyone was actually hit by bullets, and police assaulted the cameraman immediately after the shots, cutting short the film. The incident comes days after four protesters were shot by police in a similar conflict over a mineral project in Cuzco region. (Radio Nacional, June 1)