Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a 32-year-old Venezuelan immigrant legally residing in the United States, has apparently been disappeared to El Salvador’s notorious Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) after mistakenly turning onto the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit, Michigan.
The bridge, one of North America’s busiest international crossings, links Detroit with Windsor, Ontario. Due to the complexity of nearby highways, even local residents occasionally take the wrong ramp. For Prada, this innocent mistake led to arrest, imprisonment, and deportation—culminating in his disappearance into a foreign prison.
Yes, language matters and they used it correctly here. As an intransitive verb it means that someone is not detectable. As a transitive verb it means that someone else made them disappear, which usually refers to being abducted, usually by an official group like an arm of the government.
It has been used that way for decades to indicate when a governement kidnaps citizens to detain or kill them in secret.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disappear
Since you’re bringing up language points, I’m wondering if you’d be willing to take a left turn with me.
What are your thoughts about applying the phrase “extraordinary rendition” to their situation?
I feel that it’s appropriate, but I haven’t seen anyone using it.
amnesty international has accused the us government of extraordinary rendition for decades, basically since 2001. this is even worse