The UN Security Council on June 1 called for a "prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation" into the previous day's raid by Israeli commandos on an aid flotilla bound for the blockaded Gaza Strip in which 10 civilians on a Turkish ship were killed. Reaffirming two earlier resolutions calling for a two-state solution (Resolution 1850) and unimpeded humanitarian assistance (Resolution 1860), the Council urged Israel to allow other nations to retrieve their wounded and deceased and to ensure delivery of the aid materials aboard the ships.

Rural villagers are using hoes and pick axes to hunt for victims of landslides that have killed at least 179 people in Central America after the season's first tropical storm, dubbed "Agatha." Thousands remain homeless and many are still missing. Rescue crews are struggling to reach isolated communities to distribute food and water. The heaviest toll is in Guatemala, where authorities report 152 dead with 100 people still missing. In Chimaltenango department, landslides buried rural indigenous communities and killed at least 60 people. In Guatemala City, a massive sinkhole swallowed an entire intersection, gulping down a clothing factory although causing no casualties. (AP, May 31)

Edmond Mulet, acting head of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), a 9,000-member international military force, issued an apology on May 25 for an incursion by a group of Brazilian soldiers the day before into the Faculty of Ethnology at the State University of Haiti (UEH) in downtown Port-au-Prince. The soldiers arrested a student, Frantz Mathieu Junior, claiming he threw stones at them; they released him later the same day. Students responded to the invasion by burning tires and throwing rocks.

On May 25 US president Barack Obama signed into law a measure intended to promote renewed development of the low-wage apparel assembly industry in Haiti. The Haiti Economic Lift Program (HELP) Act of 2010, introduced in Congress on April 28 by a bipartisan group of representatives and senators, extends through 2020 several existing laws giving tariff preferences for apparel stitched in Haiti: the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act (CBTPA) and the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Engagement Acts of 2006 (HOPE Act) and 2008 (HOPE II).

In an interview on Spanish CCN broadcast May 19, Honduran president Porfirio ("Pepe") Lobo Sosa agreed that the removal of former president José Manuel ("Mel") Zelaya Rosales (2006-2009) from office on June 28, 2009 was a coup d'état. "Of course, put it how you will, but it was a coup," Lobo Sosa said when CNN's José Levy asked if the removal was a coup. But the Honduran president, in Madrid for a May 18 trade summit of European Union and Latin American leaders, justified the removal. "Democracy did not have sufficient mechanisms to guarantee its maintenance," he said. During his election campaign last year, Lobo Sosa avoided characterizing the June 28 action. Supporters of Zelaya's ouster generally have insisted that it was constitutional and not a coup. (Honduras Culture and Politics blog, May 22; La Vanguardia, Honduras, May 21)

Some 600 Mexican federal police agents used tear gas and nightsticks to remove about 100 members of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) on May 27 from outside the Teopanzolco substation of the Central Light and Power Company (LFC) in Cuernavaca, capital of Morelos state, south of Mexico City. The unionists, who lost their jobs along with 44,000 other LFC employees when President Felipe Calderón suddenly liquidated the state-owned power company the night of Oct. 10, were blocking access to the facility to keep the police from removing five LFC vans. The workers said they were defending their source of work.

On May 21 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), a Washington, DC-based agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), ordered the Guatemalan government to suspend operations at the Marlin gold mine in the western department of San Marcos within 20 days and to take measures to protect the local environment. The indigenous inhabitants of the communities of Sipacapa and San Miguel Ixtahuacán have protested the mine—owned by Montana Exploradora de Guatemala, SA, subsidiary of the Canadian company Goldcorp—since it began operations in 2008.

Up to 25 bodies, thought to be the victims of Mexico's ongoing narco-violence, have been found in the abandoned San Francisco Cuadra silver mine at Cacalotenango, Taxco de Alarcón municipality, in the southern state of Guerrero. The bodies appeared to have been thrown down a 180-meter ventilation shaft over a period of months, authorities said. A search of the shaft is ongoing, and authorities say more bodies may be found. Federal police have arrested 15 as suspects in connection with the clandestine mass grave—although most are being held on firearms and "organized delinquency" charges. The 15 were arrested in a barrio on the southern outskirts of Iguala city, following a tip about armed men wearing the uniforms of the disbanded Federal Agency of Investigation (AFI). (BBC News, Notimex, La Jornada, May 31; Milenio, May 30)