BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Peru’s Congress rejected Friday a proposal to create a long-delayed Amazon reserve meant to protect uncontacted Indigenous tribes living in voluntary isolation along the border with Brazil.

Advocates for the reserve say the decision leaves the remote forest vulnerable to logging, mining and other incursions, and deals a setback to a plan that has languished for more than two decades despite legal obligations to establish it.

Francisco Hernández Cayetano, president of the Federation of Ticuna and Yagua Communities of the Lower Amazon, said the commission’s rejection “shows its anti-Indigenous face in the 21st century” and signals it does not care about “the environment, the water, the culture and everything as a whole.”

He told The Associated Press that without Indigenous peoples, the Amazon and its tributaries “would already have been wiped out” and called the decision “a very hard blow from our own state, which should instead protect us.” He said his group plans to conduct additional studies and take further action before resubmitting the proposal to the Ministry of Culture, adding that the years of delay have only served to “promote more bills against Indigenous peoples to strip them of their territory.”

The 1.17 million-hectare (2.9 million-acre) Yavari Mirim Indigenous Reserve — roughly the size of Jamaica — would have protected five uncontacted tribes from outside encroachment for the first time. The Matses, Matis, Korubo, Kulina-Pano and Flecheiro, also known as Tavakina, live in voluntary isolation with no sustained contact with the outside world, leaving them highly vulnerable to disease and exploitation.