Hundreds of Puerto Ricans marched on June 6 in the island's 20th Pride event, held in San Juan's beachfront El Condado neighborhood. Olga Orraca, coordinator of the Rainbow Pride Coalition, which organized the march, said that that this year's event was intended not only to reaffirm the community's visibility but also to denounce hate crimes against LGBT people. Orraca and Human and Constitucional Rights Commission president Osvaldo Burgos criticized the inaction of the police in dealing with hate crimes eight years after a hate crimes law went into effect. (SentidoG, June 6 from El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico)

After a new four-day round of talks with a court-appointed mediator, students and the Board of Trustees at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) reached an agreement on the night of June 16-17 to end a two-month strike that had closed 10 of the public university's 11 campuses. The trustees agreed to drop plans for cutbacks in the budget and for reductions in scholarships and tuition exemptions, and they postponed until next January a plan to impose a special tuition surcharge of about $1,100 for each of the next three years. They also agreed not to penalize the strike leaders. The strikers' National Negotiating Committee (CNN) said the shutdown would end if students ratified the agreement in a national assembly on June 21.

In meetings with striking students on June 2 and June 4, officials of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) announced that the public university was $200 million in debt and that they intended to cover the debt with $200 million in tuition surcharges over the next three years—about $1,000 for each student. There will also be an "enormous reduction" in the pay to university employees, Board of Trustees president Ygrí Rivera said; this would be done through lower salaries and other cutbacks, not layoffs. Finally, UPR officials plan cuts in the budgets for books, professional services, scholarships and other aid to students, and the purchase of equipment.

Thousands of peasant farmers gathered in the main plaza in Hinche, a city in Haiti's Central Plateau, on June 4 to protest a donation of about 476 metric tons of hybrid seeds from the Monsanto Company, a US-based biotechnology multinational that produces genetically modified organisms (GMO). Agriculture Minister Joanas Gué admitted on May 12 that the government was accepting Monsanto's offer, supposedly intended to help the country recover from a devastating Jan. 12 earthquake. The seeds are not GMO, but critics say they are still a "poisoned present."

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).

Gun battles raging in the Jamaican capital have left more than 60 people dead, hospital sources said May 25, as troops fanned out across the city hunting for accused drug kingpin Christopher "Dudus" Coke. Police put the death toll at 27, but Prime Minister Bruce Golding admits the actual figure may be much higher. "The government deeply regrets the loss of lives of members of the security forces, and those of innocent law abiding citizens who were caught in the cross fire," Golding said. Hospital workers said the victims were mostly civilians.

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.