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.
“Disappeared” is the word typically used when authoritarian regimes arrest and incarcerate (or worse) people extrajudicially, without due process. “Trafficked” doesn’t have the authoritarian government connotation.
No, disappeared means no one outside the government knows where they are.