Armed men hijacked a tourist boat in the Amazon rainforest in Peru, robbed all 14 people on board and forced them to empty their bank accounts via mobile apps, according to one of the victims.

Spanish TikToker Elisabet de la Almudena, who has more than 235,000 followers on the platform, described the ordeal as the “worst day of her life” in a 4.5-minute video uploaded Tuesday.

According to her account, she was part of a 14-person group, including her parents and 6-year-old daughter, that set off on an all-day boat tour from the city of Iquitos, a popular jumping-off point to explore the rainforest.

“We contracted a family tour, a sightseeing tour, and we ended up being kidnapped,” she said.

Four men armed with pistols and a machine gun boarded the boat and sailed it deep into the forest, said de la Almudena, where they took everyone’s belongings and even the vessel’s motor.

“Through mobile phone applications, they asked us to take the money out of our accounts and transfer it to one of their accounts, otherwise they would not leave,” she added.

“I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone,” de la Almudena said.

The passengers then took pieces of wood from the boat and used them to row down the river, where they came upon a family in another boat that towed them to safety, she said.

De la Almudena claimed that the tour company, Canopy Tours Iquitos, had no GPS tracker on the boat, no insurance and no security measures in place, despite the fact that she was later told that this kind of incident has happened in the area before.

“We were completely abandoned by the people that were supposed to look after us,” she said.

In response, Canopy Tours Iquitos said the incident, which occurred on May 14, was a chance event outside of its control that “was immediately reported to the authorities.”

“We activated our emergency protocols straight away, offered our assistance to the affected group and have been actively cooperating with the investigation,” the company said in a Facebook post published Tuesday.

In addition, the company said it would strengthen security measures, including introducing GPS monitoring, closer cooperation with the police and more training for staff.

According to the US State Department, travelers to Peru should “exercise increased caution due to crime, civil unrest, and the risk of kidnapping. Some areas have increased risk.”

In a travel advisory update published May 16, the department underlined that “crime is common in Peru.”

“Petty theft, carjackings, muggings, assaults, and other violent crime often happen even in daylight hours and with many witnesses around. Kidnapping is rare, but it does occur,” it said.

Many South Africans are praising President Cyril Ramaphosa’s calm demeanor as President Donald Trump’s multimedia ambush unfolded in front of the world’s press. He pushed back gently whenever he could, but he didn’t raise his voice or show anger, displaying his decades of negotiation experience.

“What else could Cyril have done?” asked veteran journalist Milton Nkosi. “You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I think they were caught completely unawares. How on earth could you have planned for that?” said Nkosi, who’s a senior research fellow at the Africa Asia Dialogues think tank.

On social media and across South Africa’s broadcast outlets, consensus seemed to quickly form that Ramaphosa did the best under the circumstances. He remained “calm, collected and humble in the face of bigotry and lies,” posted one user on X. “You were a leader today. Went to build not to fight.”

Ramaphosa brought his own White billionaire to the meeting – luxury goods magnate Johan Rupert, who’s behind brands like Cartier – who told Trump that violent crime affects all races, but his words fell on deaf ears.

Rupert even threw tech billionaire Elon Musk, who was also in the room, a bone.

“We have too many deaths. But it’s across the board,” Rupert said. “It’s not only White farmers. It’s across the board. We need technological help. We need Starlink at every little police station. We need drones.”

One White South African called Rupert a traitor to his fellow Afrikaners in a social media post.

Another prominent White South African, agriculture minister John Steenhuisen, also tried to convince their Oval Office host that he had been misled.

The most dramatic part of the scene was when Trump called for lights to be dimmed and screened a four-and-a-half minute montage claiming to show evidence of a White genocide. It included far-left opposition leader Julius Malema singing “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer” as a crowd chanted along.

Officially named “Dubula iBhunu” in the Xhosa language, the song emerged in the 1980s to fight the unjust system of segregation. South African courts have ruled that it doesn’t mean a literal call to kill White farmers.

The Supreme Court of Appeal ruled in 2024 that any “reasonably well-informed person” would see it as a “historic struggle song, with the performance gestures that go with it, as a provocative means of advancing his party’s political agenda.”

Trump confronted Ramaphosa on why he had not arrested Malema for it.

Malema, leader of the the Economic Freedom Fighters party, responded in his typical fiery way on X: “A group of older men meet in Washington to gossip about me,” he said, disputing the claims of a genocide. “We will not agree to compromise our political principles on land expropriation without compensation for political expediency.”

Malema was expelled from Ramaphosa’s African National Congress (ANC) party more than a decade ago and came third in the most recent election.

Most of the information that Trump used to try to prove that “White genocide” is happening in South Africa has repeatedly been disproven.

Some South Africans have said that they believe that the information is “AfriForum propaganda” – referring to a White Afrikaner lobby group criticized as being a White nationalist group.

“It shows that the South African president and the ANC leadership cannot just simply sweep real problems that we have in the country under the carpet and think they will disappear,” Kallie Kriel said in a voice note.

It was the toughest public test yet for Ramaphosa, a skilled dealmaker who led negotiations for Nelson Mandela in talks that ended apartheid.

It was a good day for South Africa’s White nationalists. The president of the United States repeated their talking points from the bully pulpit of the White House, giving them the highest-profile validation they could have ever dreamed of.

The South African delegation expected a confrontational meeting, but nothing could have prepared them for the ambush that awaited them.

Portnov, 51, was shot several times as he was getting into a car around 9:15 a.m. local time in Madrid (3:15 a.m. ET), the police source said. Various assailants shot him in the back and the head, and later fled into a wooded area, the source said.

The shooting took place outside The American School of Madrid, located in Pozuelo de Alaracon, an affluent suburb just west of Madrid. It has just over 1,000 students from the United States, Spain and several dozen other countries.

Portnov was sanctioned by the United States in 2021 for corruption and bribery under the Magnitsky Act. He was “credibly accused of using his influence to buy access and decisions in Ukraine’s courts and undermining reform effort,” according to the US Treasury Department.

The Magnitsky Act, signed into law in December 2012, blocks entry into the US and freezes the assets of certain Russian and pro-Russian government officials and businessmen accused of human rights violations.

The Security Service of Ukraine previously investigated Portnov’s possible involvement in Russia’s annexation of Crimea, but the case was later closed.

The former politician fled Ukraine months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, according to an investigation by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, when men of draft age were not permitted to leave.

Canada also froze his assets in 2014 as part of a crackdown on “corrupt foreign officials,” in relation to his work as a former adviser to ousted ex-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Portnov was appointed deputy head of Yanukovych’s administration in 2010, as well as the head of Ukraine’s Main Directorate for Judicial Reform and Judicial System. At the same time, Portnov became a member of the board of the National Bank of Ukraine.

Yanukovych was driven from office by mass demonstrations in Ukraine in 2014 after he turned his back on the European Union in favor of closer ties with Russia. Yanukovych then fled Ukraine, and Portnov also left the country at the time.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

A group of 59 White South Africans arrived in the United States last week after being granted refugee status by the White House, which has fast-tracked the processing of Afrikaner refugees but paused refugee applications for other nationalities.

On Wednesday, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa is set to meet his US counterpart Donald Trump in Washington, seeking a reset in relations with the United States. Ties between both nations have been fraught since Trump froze aid to South Africa in February over claims it was mistreating its minority White population.

The South African government said “reframing bilateral, economic and commercial relations” was the specific focus of Ramaphosa’s US visit. Ramaphosa said that the White South Africans arriving in the US “do not fit the bill” for having refugee status as someone who is leaving their country out of fear of persecution.

But as thousands more Afrikaners hope for admission to the US, others insist they have no need of refugee status but want America’s help instead to tackle a wave of violent crime in South Africa, or even to establish an autonomous state within a state.

Joost Strydom leads the group of White South Africans who have dismissed the US’ offer of asylum, and heads Orania, a separatist “Afrikaner-only” settlement in the country’s Northern Cape.

“Help us here,” he said his message was to Trump, whom he hopes will recognize Orania’s quest for self-determination.

Home to some 3,000 Afrikaners, the 8,000-hectare (19,800-acre) Orania town is partially self-governing. The exclusively White enclave produces half of its own electricity needs, takes local taxes, and prints its own currency that’s pegged to the South African rand. But the settlement’s residents want more: its recognition as an independent state.

Strydom was part of Orania’s delegation to the US in late March to push for this goal.

“We met with government officials,” he said. “The conversation is ongoing, and it is something that we’ve decided to keep a low profile on.”

Orania is backed by a 1994 post-apartheid accord that allowed for Afrikaner self-determination, including the concept of an Afrikaner state, referred to as Volkstaat.

Strydom anticipates that the settlement could develop into a “national home for the Afrikaner people.”

Why are some Afrikaners fleeing to the US?

Afrikaners are the descendants of predominantly Dutch settlers in South Africa, with White South Africans making up roughly 7% of the country’s population as of 2022 – a share that had declined from 11% in 1996, census data shows. A discriminatory apartheid government led by Afrikaners lost power in the mid-1990s, replaced by a multi-party democracy dominated by the African National Congress.

At least 67,000 South Africans have shown interest in seeking refugee status in the US, according to the South African Chamber of Commerce in the USA (SACCUSA).

In comments justifying his decision to resettle Afrikaners in the US, Trump cited claims that “a genocide is taking place” in South Africa, adding that “White farmers are being brutally killed and their land confiscated.”

South African authorities have strongly denied such claims. In a statement in February, the South African Police Service said “only one farmer, who happens to be white,” had been killed between October 1 and December 31, and urged the public “to desist from assumptions that belong to the past, where farm murders are the same as murders of white farmers.”

Police minister Senzo Mchunu stressed in a recent statement that there was no evidence of a “White genocide” in the country.

The police crime figure for the last quarter of 2024 had been disputed by an Afrikaner advocacy group, AfriForum, which argued that five farm owners were murdered during those months and that police had underreported the actual figures.

Most of the attacks happened in Gauteng province, the group stated. Gauteng is home to the largest concentration of South Africa’s White population, according to the country’s last census in 2022, with about 1.5 million Whites living there.

Afrikaner farmer Adriaan Vos is a recent victim of Gauteng’s farm attacks. The 55-year-old said he was left fighting for his life just two months ago after being shot on his farm in Glenharvie, a township in Westonaria, West of Gauteng.

“I was shot twice in the knee and once at my back,” Vos said about the attack on his farm in the early hours of March 16.

“Luckily, that bullet stuck next to my lung,” he said, adding that his farmhouse was pillaged and set on fire the same night.

Vos could not identify his attackers and is unsure whether the attack was racially motivated. But the raid appears to be part of a pattern of farm attacks that has persisted for years in South Africa, a country grappling with one of the world’s highest murder rates. South African authorities rarely publish crime figures by race but local media report that most murder victims are Black.

South African leader Ramaphosa does not believe that Afrikaners are being persecuted – as claimed by Trump and his ally Elon Musk, who was born and raised in the country – and has described those fleeing to the US as “cowards” who are opposed to his government’s efforts to undo the legacy of apartheid, especially inequality.

One of those efforts was the controversial enactment in January of an Expropriation Act, which empowers South Africa’s government to take land and redistribute it – with no obligation to pay compensation in some instances – if the seizure is found to be “just and equitable and in the public interest.”

Under apartheid, Black South Africans were forcibly dispossessed of their lands for the benefit of Whites. Today, some three decades after racial segregation officially ended in the country, Blacks, who comprise over 80% of the country’s population of 63 million, own around 4% of private land while 72% is held by Whites.

Who are the Afrikaners staying back, and what do they want?

For some Afrikaners in Orania, there is more to lose than gain if they choose to be refugees in the US.

Built from scratch on arid land described by Strydom as “an abandoned ghost town” with extreme weather, Orania has witnessed infrastructural growth and is the most realistic place to preserve Afrikaner culture and heritage, according to Cara Tomlinson who coordinates an Afrikaner cultural association.

“When we travel outside Orania in South Africa, it is very common to be looked at with hate,” he added.

Both Roets and Tomlinson desire Trump’s recognition for Orania, but the legitimacy of the separatist town has been questioned by other South Africans, including members of the radical left-wing party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) who say that its “Afrikaner-only” policy “institutionalizes exclusion.”

South Africa’s foreign ministry said Orania had no status as a nation within a nation and remained bound by South African laws.

Beyond Orania, other Afrikaners, such as Vos, who’s still nursing his injuries, do not plan to leave despite the pressures felt by farmers.

“I’m lucky to be alive,” he said, adding: “I must look after this place (his farmland), whatever is left. We were born and bred here. South Africa is all we know.”

But help must come fast, Vos warned, as he outlined what he hoped Ramaphosa will tell his US opposite number during his visit to the White House.

“We need help in South Africa because you don’t know if you’re going to wake up tomorrow. It’s a mess here,” he said.

“Hopefully, he (Ramaphosa) can be open about everything (with Trump) … and say, ‘I’m going to fix it, and I’m going to look after the farmers and the people that are putting food in my mouth.’ He must come and do it, implement it, and let’s start over again.”