The "merchant ensign" under the Constitution, which means (as I understand it) that private citizens may use either version on land but should properly speaking use the version without arms at sea. Christopher Southworth, 12 March 2006
This flag design is often used instead of the proper national flag. I think it results from a combination of what Emerson called a foolish consistency, and trying to squeeze messy vexillogical realities into our artificial pigeonholes. The general policy seems to be that when a nation has what we term both a civil flag and a state flag, we give precedence to the civil flag. That seems to work well enough when we are dealing with European nations, since their citizens seem in general to also regard the civil flag as the default "national flag." However, this policy is not at all appropriate for most Latin American nations. The exact boundaries between "civil" and "state" flags, their respective usages, and their connotations do not seem to be precisely the same in Latin America as in Europe. From what I can observe, it seems most Latin Americans regard the "state" flag rather than the "civil" one as the "national flag." Ned Smith, 29 March 2004
