This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Brazil’s far-right president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro, will abolish the country’s human rights ministry and has named a conservative evangelical pastor to run a newly created ministry which will oversee women, family and human rights – and also the country’s 900,000 indigenous people.

The plan, announced on Thursday, has prompted outcry from feminist groups, indigenous activists and LGBT campaigners, who fear it indicates that human rights will be downgraded under the incoming government.

The new minister, Damares Alves, is a lawyer, evangelical preacher and congressional aide, who co-founded a group that rescues indigenous children from situations of danger and evangelises in indigenous communities.

She opposes abortion – illegal in Brazil in most cases – believes that women were born to be mothers, and said she plans to work for the “invisible” people in society, such as Gypsies and women who cut sugar cane and tap rubber.

In 2016, she told an evangelical congregation: “It is time for the church to tell the nation that we have come … It is time for the church to govern.”

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Boslonaro’s chief of staff, Onyx Lorenzoni, said on Thursday that the new ministry would also house Funai, Brazil’s indigenous agency.

The new president wants to permit commercial mining and farming on indigenous reserves, which make up around 13% of Brazilian territory and include some of the Amazon’s best protected areas. Last week he compared indigenous people to zoo animals.

“Why in Brazil do we have to keep them as inmates in reserves, as if they were animals in a zoo?” he told reporters.

Funai’s future has come under intense speculation after Lorenzoni said it could become part of the Ministry of Agriculture. On Thursday, indigenous leaders visited Bolsonaro’s transition team to demand the agency stayed where it is.

“It is regrettable that the governments disregards this,” said Cleber Buzatto, executive secretary of the Indigenous Missionary council, a group linked to Brazil’s conference of bishops.

He said Alves’s appointment could “bring substantially serious risks to the cultural aspects of indigenous people”.

Alves, who has an adopted indigenous daughter, is one of the founders of Atini – Voz Pela Vida (Voice For Life), a group combating the infanticide of disabled and unwanted children, a practice in some remote indigenous communities. The group’s Facebook page also shows its members preaching in indigenous villages.

It is linked to the missionary group Youth With A Mission, whose mission is to “preach the gospel to every creature in the world”.

Speaking anonymously, a Funai official said staff have been left “bewildered”.

“They chose the worst possible [person]. We are in a state of shock,” the official said.

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Under the leftwing president Dilma Rousseff, Brazil had a ministry of women, racial equality and human rights, which her successor Michel Temer downgraded into a secretariat for women’s policies, first under the justice ministry, then moved in June this year to the human rights ministry.

Feminists expressed concern over Alves history of criticising abortion and feminism.

“We want a Brazil without abortion,” she told reporters on Thursday. Last March, she attacked feminism in an interview. “It’s as if there was a war between men and women in Brazil. This does not exist,” she told the Expresso Nacional YouTube channel in March. “Women are born to be mothers,” she told O Globo newspaper.

Carolina Oms, editorial director of magazine AzMina, said Bolsonaro’s decision to lump women and family and human rights into one ministry showed how little regard he had for the issues concerned.

“This government is not concerned in reducing the inequalities of women, of homosexuals or minorities in Brazil,” she said.

Bolsonaro has repeatedly expressed homophobic views over the years. But Alves defended gay marriage – which is legal in Brazil – on Thursday.

Toni Reis, director-president of the National Alliance for LGBTI group (Alianca Nacional LGBTI), said he would work to find common ground with her.

“We have many divergences with her and some similarities,” he said. “It will be very hard to make advances but we will not accept going backwards.”

• This article’s headline was amended on 10 December 2018 to clarify that Jair Bolsonaro plans to abolish the human rights ministry once he assumes the presidency.