Environmental Protection Agency staff opened their inboxes Thursday to find an agency-wide Hispanic Heritage Month email featuring a prominent picture of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, and largely plagiarized from the website Buzzle.com.
According to the EPA, the email — which heralded the beginning Hispanic Heritage Month on Saturday and offered cultural details about Hispanics — was an accident and the employee responsible has apologized.
Recommended Stories
“The email was drafted and sent by an individual employee, and without official clearance. Shortly after sending the email in question the individual apologized to her colleagues for the inadvertent error,” an EPA spokesman emailed TheDC in a statement.
While it was a mistake, the email caught the eye and ire of Foreign Relations Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen who called the image of Guevara “insulting.”
“I am aghast and upset that a federal agency would send an email depicting el Che Guevara in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month. This Administration just doesn’t seem to get it,” Ros-Lehtinen said in a statement.
