Eddie Canales, 76, Dies; Gave Migrants Water, and Dignity

Eddie Canales, a human rights advocate who fought to save migrants trekking through the harsh terrain of South Texas, died on July 30 at his home in Corpus Christi. He was 76.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Nancy Vera, his associate at the South Texas Human Rights Center, the nonprofit rescue organization that Mr. Canales founded in Falfurrias, Texas.

For over a decade, Mr. Canales placed dozens of water stations — giant blue plastic barrels marked “Agua” filled with gallon water jugs — along the region’s routes for migrants evading a checkpoint on U.S. Route 281, about 70 miles north of the border with Mexico. The migrants, who are usually led (and sometimes abandoned) by smugglers, known as “coyotes,” leave the main road and undertake a perilous journey through featureless scrub and bush to evade the Border Patrol.

Some don’t make it. Those who fail succumb to severe dehydration, hunger and exposure to the unforgiving elements in a semi-desert where temperatures can easily reach 100 degrees in the summer and drop below freezing during the winter. Mr. Canales led a campaign to recover, identify and ensure proper burials for the migrants’ remains.

The mission required forcefulness and tact. The land is private and belongs to South Texas ranchers, many indifferent or hostile. Some have created armed posses dressed in military gear to hunt up the migrants and turn them over to the authorities, as shown in a trenchant 2021 documentary about Mr. Canales’s work, “Missing in Brooks County.”

The migrants “go through the ranches,” Mr. Canales said in a 2015 oral history interview for the University of North Texas.