NYT: Eddie Canales, 76, Dies; Gave Migrants Water, and Dignity (UPDATED LINK)

Last edited Mon Aug 12, 2024, 08:45 AM - Edit history (2)

After a long career as a union organizer, he came out of retirement in 2013 to form the South Texas Human Rights Center and provide lifesaving aid.


Eddie Canales, the founder of the South Texas Human Rights Center, at a cemetery in Falfurrias, Texas, in 2022. In addition to providing water to migrants, his organization recovers, identifies and ensures proper burials for migrants’ remains.Credit...Allison Dinner/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

https://archive.ph/JxN2M

By Adam Nossiter
Aug. 10, 2024

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.

FULL story at link above.