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.

Four Puerto Rican union leaders chained themselves to the gates of the Fortaleza, the governor's official residence, in San Juan on Sept. 28 to protest plans to lay off 16,970 of the island's 180,000 public employees. About 30 other unionists set up what they called a "Camp of Dignity and Shame" outside the 16th-century fortress. After a brief scuffle, police agents dispersed the group, which included members of the General Workers Union (UGT) and Robert Pagán, president of Local 1996SPT of the US-based Service Employers International Union (SEIU). No arrests or injuries were reported. Pagán promised that this was just the first of "dozens of civil disobedience actions" against the layoffs.

Brazilian organizations delivered an open letter to the United Nations Information Center in the Itamaraty Palace in Rio de Janeiro on Oct. 5 opposing the continued presence of Brazilian troops in Haiti. Afterwards the activists held a solidarity event with hip-hop presentations in the Largo Carioca plaza in downtown Rio. The UN Security Council is expected to renew the mandate for the Brazilian-led United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), now five years old, sometime before Oct. 15.

During a meeting in Brasilia on Sept. 17, Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim and US commerce representative Ronald Kirk ratified a plan to allow Brazilian companies operating in Haiti to export products to the US without paying customs fees. This would be done through an extension of two US trade acts ostensibly aiding Haitian industries: the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity Through Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) Act of 2006 and the HOPE 2 Act of 2008. Amorim told the Chinese news agency Xinhua that the initiative's goal is humanitarian, "to aid Haiti's economic development through sustainable production activity," although he noted that it would also benefit Brazilian and US companies.

On Sept. 9 Haitian riot police and SWAT teams entered the grounds of the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy (FMP) of the State University of Haiti (UEH) in downtown Port-au-Prince and arrested about 20 students who had been occupying a building there since Sept. 7 to prevent the start of classes. Although police agents are generally not allowed on campuses in Haiti, the authorities said the raid was legal because the school's administration had asked for it and a justice of the peace was present to monitor the operation. Students from the UEH's Faculty of Ethnology responded to the raid by throwing rocks, and demonstrations continued at least through Sept. 11, when some 40 vehicles were reportedly attacked by students.

A series of wildcat strikes that shut down an industrial park on Port-au-Prince's northern outskirts for at least two days in early August continued into the week of Aug. 10 as thousands of Haitian workers, students and activists demonstrated for a law to increase the country's minimum wage from 70 gourdes ($1.74) a day to 200 gourdes ($4.97). President René Préval has blocked the 200 gourde increase, arguing it would hurt the country's maquiladora sector—the tax-exempt plants that assemble products chiefly for export—and cause the loss of thousands of jobs.