Influence of commuter rioters and income distribution on the 2019 Chilean unrest

At the end of the year 2019, Chile and, most specifically, Santiago, its capital, went through a large number of episodes of public violence, lasting several months. The geographical distribution of the intensity of those episodes has been studied in several previous works. There it was found that the geographic disposition of the public transport network largely explained which places from Santiago suffered most of the activity. A more recent work found that daily commuting travel, together with an epidemiological model, reproduced the main features of Santiago’s rioting distribution. The travelers who participated in the public disorder were called commuter rioters. The present work uses that previous epidemiological model, incorporating the influence of the commuter’s income on it. It was found that income redistribution, a by-product of daily travel, changes the disorder’s spatial density, showing a better agreement with the observations than otherwise and improving this formulation as a tool for describing and predicting different riot outcomes.