Brainwashing, for better or worse, has already been weakened. So someone using that term today is using it in a very different context. Time and context matters.
Now, you add in things like torture and detainment. I mean, whatever. Feel free to die on this hill. My post's point is that the vast majority of society does not think of the Dirty War, or any sort of violence, when they hear the phrase "I was disappeared".
Hedges hasn't been literally "disappeared", made invisible, any more than he's been a victim of what "to be disappeared" has come to mean.
> Now, you add in things like torture and detainment
I'm sorry, where do you think the unmarked van is going? "Now you add in detainment" — detainment at least. If somebody disappears, it's either because they're being kept somewhere secretly or because they've been killed.