In the first few minutes of the new documentary Missing in Brooks County, Eddie Canales idles his truck along a long stretch of trees, brush, and barbed wire. A few steps away a plastic barrel marked “Agua” sits under a tattered Red Cross flag where Canales retrieves a few empty water jugs and replaces them with full ones. Here in Brooks County, a rural Texas community located near the U.S.-Mexico border, summertime temperatures regularly exceed 100 degrees. A person could easily die of thirst out here, and as Canales drives his truck down the road he halts when he sees buzzards nearby. “Whoa,” he says, watching the birds as they circle. “They’re here.”
A grizzled, aging man, Canales gingerly climbs over barbed wire and hacks through tall grass to discover what the buzzards have already found. A migrant is lying on the ground, dead. The man faces the sky, his arms outstretched, his chest swollen.
Hundreds die traversing this sweltering landscape every summer to evade the state’s largest border patrol checkpoint in nearby Falfurrias. There is no infrastructure to help them: Canales is the one-man engine behind the tiny South Texas Human Rights Center, providing humanitarian help where it can in Brooks County. Yet this unnamed soul is one of thousands of missing migrants whose families will never know what happened to them.
