The anatomy of the 2019 Chilean social unrest

Abstract: We analyze the 2019 Chilean social unrest episode, consisting of a sequence of events, through the lens of an epidemic-like model that considers global contagious dynamics. We adjust the parameters to the Chilean social unrest aggregated public data available from the Undersecretary of Human Rights, and observe that the number of violent events follows a well-defined pattern already observed in various public disorder episodes in other countries since the sixties. Although the epidemic-like models display a single event that reaches a peak followed by an exponential decay, we add standard perturbation schemes that may produce a rich temporal behavior as observed in the 2019 Chilean social turmoil. Although we only have access to aggregated data, we are still able to fit it to our model quite well, providing interesting insights on social unrest dynamics.