Disappeared as transitive

[Benjamin Barrett]

The election of Argentinean cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as papa has brought Argentina's dirty war into the news.

Twice I've seen "disappeared" used as a transitive verb in quotes in the Seattle Times without any explanation or reason. It seems more difficult to use "disappear" this way and add the quotes than to say "make someone disappear," so I'm puzzled by this use. An example can be seen in the Washington Post as well (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/vatican-defends-pope-francis-against-argentina-dirty-war-allegations/2013/03/15/d4a11e3c-8d90-11e2-9f54-f3fdd70acad2_story.html)

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But questions about the activities of Bergoglio from 1976 to 1983, when a military dictatorship terrorized much of Argentina and “disappeared” thousands of its own citizens, remain a cloud over his papacy’s otherwise bright early days.
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I assume this comes from Spanish. Here again, though, nobody is being quoted, either in Spanish or Latin.

Wiktionary claims a transitive meaning of "disappear" (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disappear) with a 1973 Heller citation, and provides desaparecer as the Spanish translation (though http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/desaparecer#Spanish doesn't provide a transitive meaning, it could just be incomplete).

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA
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