On Nov. 25, Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) announced that it was rejecting the applications of 16 of the 69 parties that submitted candidates for legislative elections scheduled to be held on Feb. 28. The largest of the rejected parties is the Lavalas Family (FL) of former president Jean Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996 and 2001-2004); among the others were the Lespwa ("Hope") coalition, until now the party of current president René Préval; Working Together to Build Haiti (KONBA); the Union party; and the Solidarity Effort for the Construction of the People's Camp (ESCAMP), formerly part of Lespwa. Voters are to elect 98 of the 99 members of the Chamber of Deputies and 10 of the country's 30 senators.

Chilean troops from the Brazilian-led United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) wounded one local man in the early morning of Nov. 10 when they opened fire on a crowd in Grand-Goâve, a town south of Port-au-Prince in the West Department, according to Haitian witnesses. Chilean Gen. Ricardo Toro Tassara said airborne troops from Chile's 514-member contingent landed during a nighttime training exercise when one of their UH-1H helicopters developed a mechanical problem. At daybreak a crowd of 200 residents gathered around the helicopter asking for food and water, Toro Tassara said, and when some came "closer than necessary," the soldiers fired into the air to disperse them.

One person was killed and one wounded in the early morning of Nov. 11 during protests over power outages in the community of Canca, Licey al Medio municipality, in the northern Dominican province of Santiago. Police spokesperson Jesús Cordero Paredes told the Spanish EFE news service that masked protesters had been blocking a highway with tree trunks and burning tires at 3am when Ramón Martín Medina Rivas and Emilio José Vargas drove up to the barricade in a truck carrying plantains and other farm products to be sold in the Santiago market. The protesters fired on the truck, killing Medina and wounding Vargas, according to the police.

On Oct. 13 the United Nations (UN) Security Council approved a one-year extension of the mandate for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), a 9,000-member military and police force that has occupied Haiti under Brazilian leadership since June 2004. The main change in the mandate is a slight reduction in the number of soldiers from 7,000 a 6,940, with the number of police agents increasing from 2,000 to 2,211. (Adital, Oct. 15)

Santiago Alvarez, underwriter of accused right-wing Cuban terrorist Luis Posada Carriles and himself convicted in weapons stockpiling for a supposed terror plot, was released from US immigration custody in Georgia Oct. 22. Alvarez pleaded guilty in 2006 to weapons charges related to what the government called a scheme to overthrow Fidel Castro. His sentence was reduced from four years to 11 months for voluntarily handing over a hidden arms cache. Alvarez, a Miami developer, then got more time for refusing to testify against Posada in an immigration fraud case. Prosecutors said Alvarez was on a boat that secretly ferried Posada from Mexico to Miami in 2005. A US resident, Alvarez was eligible for deportation, but the US doesn't generally deport Cubans; he therefore remained in immigration custody after his release from prison in November 2008. The 2006 bust yielded 30 automatic rifles, a rocket launcher, several grenades, over 200 pounds of dynamite, and 14 pounds of C-4 explosives. (Havana Times, Oct. 23; AP, UPI, Oct. 22)

A one-day general strike protesting plans to lay off 16,970 of Puerto Rico's 180,000 public employees in November shut down all state-owned enterprises and the island's schools and colleges on Oct. 15; most private businesses reportedly remained open remained open, and ports and airports were said to be functioning normally. There were protests throughout Puerto Rico, with tens of thousands of people converging on San Juan's Plaza Las Américas, the biggest shopping mall in the Caribbean.

On Oct. 6 Haiti's WIN Group conglomerate and the US-based Soros Economic Development Fund announced plans to build a $45 million industrial park named "West Indies Free Zone" near Port-au-Prince's impoverished Cité Soleil neighborhood. The 1.2 million square foot facility, to be completed in 2012, will "offer tax, customs and processing advantages to tenants" and is expected "to create 25,000 jobs and improve the standard of living for the 300,000 residents" of Cité Soleil, according to a WIN Group press release. The free trade zone's executives "are already in preliminary discussions with North American and European apparel manufacturers."

The Washington, DC-based investigative nonprofit National Security Archive released several documents on Oct. 6 written by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1965 and 1966 about its Cuban-born longtime "asset" Luis Posada Carriles, who currently lives in Miami under indictment after entering the US illegally in 2005. The Archive's Peter Kornbluh obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.