Agencia federal emplea imagen del Che por Hispanic Heritage Month

WND/

An email from the Environmental Protection Agency to employees about Hispanic Heritage Month was a copy-and-paste production that included the image of Che Guevara, the insurgent who helped bring Fidel Castro to power in Cuba and is thought to have ordered hundreds of people executed during that time.

A report in the Weekly Standard highlighted the work of the federal bureaucracy that apparently copied text and images from Buzzle.com.

And U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Florida, was outraged.

“I am aghast and upset that a federal agency would send an email depicting el Che Guevara in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month,” she wrote today in a statement on her website. “This administration just doesn’t seem to get it. The image of Che is an insult to countless people who lost family members because of his evil and twisted acts.”

At historyofcuba.com, Guevara is called “an intellectual and an idealist, able to speak coherently about Aristotle, Kant, Marx, Gide or Faulkner.” The site credits Guevara with “an important role in converting Castro to communism.”

Ros-Lehtinen, however, uses different words.

“El Che was a blood thirsty, vengeful, cowardly, sadistic, two bit delinquent who used his position as enforcer in chief of the Castro brothers to send countless innocent persons before the firing squads. His role in the early part of the disastrous calamity that befell the Cuban nation known as the Castro Revolution is well documented and those who ignore it do so willingly so as not to tarnish their love affair with the dictatorship of the Castro brothers.

“Surely, the EPA could have chosen the image of a Hispanic person who really possessed the attributes that showcase our proud Hispanic heritage,” she continued. “This sad and unnecessary episode encompasses all that is wrong with this administration: Their priorities are backwards and their allegiances border on the fringe of society with a leftist fanatical slant that is worrisome and not descriptive of our great nation.”

The Standard report said the email was from Susie Goldring and the subject was Hispanic Heritage Month.

Under the headline “Hispanic news you can use!” was the copied text about the events beginning on Sept. 15, the anniversary of independence for five Latin American countries – Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

It features the image of a horse and carriage passing an image of Che on a billboard.

BuzzFeed Politics noted both the image of the “Marxist revolutionary” as well as the “plagiarism.”

The “text and the photo appear to be lifted word-for-word and without attribution,” BuzzFeed reported.