Title and Status
These forces are normally titled “gendarmerie”, but gendarmeries may bear other titles, for instance the Carabinieri in Italy, the Guarda Nacional Republicana in Portugal or the Guardia Civil in Spain.
As a result of their duties within the civilian population, gendarmeries are sometimes described as "para-military" rather than "military" forces (especially in the English-speaking world where policing is rarely associated with military forces) although this description rarely corresponds to their official status and capabilities. Gendarmes are often deployed in military situations, sometimes in their own country, and often in humanitarian deployments abroad.
A gendarmerie may come under the authority of a ministry of defence (e.g., Italy), a ministry of the interior (e.g., Romania), or even both at once (e.g. Chile, France, and Portugal). Generally there is some coordination between a ministry of defence and a ministry of the interior over the use of gendarmes.
Some forces which are no longer considered military retain the title “gendarmerie” for reasons of tradition. For instance, the French language title of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is Gendarmerie royale du Canada (GRC) (i.e., Royal Gendarmerie of Canada) because it was traditionally a military force (although separate from the Canadian Army) and because until the 1960s it retained an honorific status as a regiment of dragoons. The Argentine Gendarmerie is a military force (in terms of training, identity and public perception, and it was involved in combat in the Falklands War), but for legal purposes is a "security force", not an "armed force", because this is necessary under Argentine law in order to allow jurisdiction over the civilian population.
Since every country uses institutional terms such as “gendarmerie” as it wishes, there are cases in which the term may become confusing. For instance, in the French-speaking Cantons of Switzerland the “gendarmeries” are the uniformed civil police (see: Gendarmerie (Switzerland)). In Chile, the word “gendarmerie” refers for historic reasons to the prison service (the "Chilean Gendarmerie"), while the actual gendarmerie force is called the "carabineros".
Gendarmeries are police services, but in many countries (e.g., France) the word "police" normally implies civilian police. Gendarmeries are military police, however the term "military police" can be misleading, since in English it carries strong implications of policing within the military, which is not the basic purpose of a gendarmerie (although in many countries - e.g., Italy - it is a task which gendarmes carry out).
In some cases, a police service's military links are ambiguous and it can be unclear whether a force should be defined as a gendarmerie or not (e.g. Mexico's Federal Police, Brazil's Military Police, or the former South African Police until 1994). Services such as the Italian Guardia di Finanza would rarely be defined as gendarmeries since the service is both of ambiguous military status and does not have general policing duties in the civilian population. In Russia, the Internal Troops are military units with quasi-police duties.
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