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.

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.

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.

Several thousand people marched in Port-au-Prince on May 10 in the latest and largest in a series of demonstrations against the government of Haitian President René Garcia Préval. The protesters started from various neighborhoods in the capital, including St. Jean Bosco, Bel Air and Carrefour Feuilles, and converged on the ruins of the National Palace. A confrontation with the police started when the protesters approached the National Palace's security perimeter; shots were fired, and police agents dispersed the demonstration with tear gas. Some people reportedly took advantage of the confusion to steal cell phones, jewels and money in the Champ-de-Mars park and along Capois Street; the police arrested seven people. Organizers charged that the trouble was caused by infiltrators sent in to disrupt the demonstration.

At a May 12 press conference Haitian agriculture minister Joanas Gué announced that the government had accepted a "gift of 475,947 kilograms [about 523.6 US tons] of hybrid corn seeds along with 2,067 kilograms of vegetable seeds" from the Monsanto Company, a US-based biotechnology multinational that produces genetically modified organisms (GMO). He denied that the seeds were genetically modified.

Police agents took control of the entrances to the Río Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) in San Juan on the morning of May 14 in an effort to cut off student protesters on the campus from their supporters outside. The action came one day after an assembly of some 2,000 students voted to continue an open-ended strike that started on April 21 at Río Piedras, the largest of the UPR's 11 campuses, to protest plans for a $100 million cut to the annual budget of the public university, which has a student body of about 65,000.

On April 29 the Vietnamese telecommunications company Viettel formally acquired 60% of the shares in Haiti's state-owned phone company, Télécommunications d'Haiti (Haiti Téléco). Central Bank president Charles Castel said the company, which escaped the privatization process that led to the sell-off of several state enterprises in the 1990s, was constantly in the red and required monthly subsidies from the government. According to Téléco director Michel Presumé, the company had "more than 5,000 employees who weren't doing anything." "A lot of them spent more time in the radio stations than in their places of employment," he added, presumably referring to workers giving interviews about their opposition to the company's privatization.

On the night of April 15-16 the Haitian Senate approved an 18-month extension of the state of emergency that President René Préval decreed after a Jan. 12 earthquake killed some 230,000 people and devastated the capital area. The "emergency law," which had been approved by the Chamber of Deputies one week earlier, would take effect once Préval had it published in the official government gazette, Le Moniteur.