Bolivia is not a typical Latin American country by any definition. But for Haiti, it is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and it is even less stable, with a history of more than two hundred coups since independence.

In a region with a strong indigenous past but a scattered and isolated present, Bolivia is, alongside Guatemala, perhaps the only country in Latin America where indigenous peoples make up a majority of the population. Its topography and ethnic distribution are generating autonomist and even secessionist forces that threaten national unity in more menacing ways than anywhere else. And, of course, it is, with Paraguay, the only land-locked nation on the sub-continent.

So it would be highly imprudent to extrapolate Bolivia’s current crisis to the rest of Latin America. It is far too simple to generalize: institutions elsewhere are much stronger, poverty – and particularly extreme poverty – have been diminishing, and the battle over natural resources has been largely settled. Even in places like Venezuela, with both huge oil reserves and a traditional-minded nationalist government, the status quo allowing for foreign investment in energy resources has survived nearly eight years of President Hugo Chavez.

While the existence of indigenous movements is a reality in many countries, from Chiapas to “Araucania,” from Amazonia to Ayacucho, nowhere in Latin America have they posed a genuine threat to national integrity. So Bolivia is not a premonitory crisis; nor does the hoary old “domino theory,” to which both Lyndon Johnson and Che Guevara subscribed in the case of Bolivia, seem valid or even half-way reasonable.

Yet Bolivia’s current crisis does point to the “democratic deficit” that plagues Latin America today. Elected leaders have fallen for one reason or another in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Haiti. Democracy is either defective or missing in Cuba, Mexico, and Nicaragua, and it is threatened by one cause or another in Venezuela and Colombia. None of these cases are identical to the others; they include varying degrees of danger, harm, or reconciliation.

The question is what can be done about this state of affairs, which contrasts starkly with the encouraging outlook that prevailed just a few years back. At the last Organization of American States assembly in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the United States delegation took a good idea from others and, by its support, essentially sank it.

The story began a couple of years ago, when former Argentine Foreign Minister Dante Caputo and the United Nations Development Program were charged with drafting the Latin American Democracy Report. They concluded that an early warning system for democratic crises in the region would help generate action before matters got out of control, as in Bolivia today.

Caputo and the UN team then convinced Chilean President Ricardo Lagos to take up the initiative and to promote it with several of his colleagues. He did, but the initiative did not get very far. In fact, The UNDP/Latin America Democracy Report, published in 2004, barely mentioned it.

The US and the new Chilean Secretary General of the OAS, Jose Miguel Insulza, resurrected the plan during the OAS meeting in Florida, but it was shot down by Latin Americans’ reasonable fears that the idea was directed against Venezuela, mingled with Latin Americans’ anachronistic fears of violating the sacrosanct principle of non-intervention.

Despite the continent’s failure to agree on the principle, the idea of an early-warning system deserves attention. Today there may be little that the hemispheric community can do about the situation in Bolivia, and yet it is fraught with danger for everyone. Evo Morales, the leader of the opposition and of the coca-leaf growers, may be an honest, if misguided, democratic leader, but are his followers untainted by authoritarian desires? Hugo Chavez may not be financing Morales and Bolivia’s other dissidents, but are Venezuela and Cuba really not tempted to meddle in the country where Che Guevara died leading a guerrilla war nearly 40 years ago?

Bolivia’s Santa Cruz business community may not carry out its threat to secede, but will they prefer to share their region’s oil and gas reserves with the indigenous highland peoples rather than with Brazilian industrialists from São Paulo?

Before events reached these extremes, it might have been a good idea for the OAS (not the US) to get involved. The region continues to need that involvement – on time, on message, and on a proper democratic platform, one that is distinct from both traditional US intervention and Latin America’s traditional indifference.