The Guardian reports:

Neiyerver Rengel’s captors came one sunny spring morning, lurking outside the apartment he shared with his girlfriend and pouncing as soon as he emerged.

The three government agents announced the young Venezuelan man had “charges to answer” and was being detained.

“Everything’s going to be OK,” the man’s girlfriend, Richely Alejandra Uzcátegui Gutiérrez, remembers the handcuffed 27-year-old reassuring her as she gave him one last hug.

Then Rengel was put in a vehicle and vanished into thin air: spirited into custody and, his family would later learn, dispatched to a detention centre notorious for torture and inhuman conditions hundreds of miles from home.

“We have to take him,” Uzcátegui recalls one officer saying before they left. “But if this is a misunderstanding, he’ll be released and given a phone call to contact you.”

That call never came.

The scenes above might have played out in any number of Latin American dictatorships during the 20th century, from Gen Augusto Pinochet’s Chile to Gen Jorge Rafael Videla’s Argentina. Thousands of regime opponents were seized at home or on the street – and slipped off the map, becoming “desaparecidos” (the disappeared ones).

But Rengel’s disappearance took place on 13 March this year in Donald Trump’s US, where what campaigners call the “forced disappearance” of scores of Venezuelan migrants has fuelled fears of an authoritarian tack under a leader who vowed to be a dictator “on day one” of his presidency. Those fears intensified on Friday amid reports that a judge had been arrested by the FBI for supposedly helping “an illegal alien” evade arrest. [Continue reading…]