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I tentatively agree, but with the caveat that a strong drug cartel is a type a government, not that government is a type of cartel. That is, you can governments which are and are not cartels, or an spectrum more or less cartel-like (show me a cartel that lets all of the citizens in their territory vote on their leadership). So it's definitely a noncentral fallacy to say something like "government are like cartels on these metric, cartels are bad, therefore government bad". Which you didn't say outright but appear to be suggesting (please correct me if this is a wrong interpretation of your view).
But as your own post demonstrates by comparing Philadelphia vs Juarez, having a force with a monopoly on violence can create stability and order that otherwise wouldn't exist. If we just abolished governments then everywhere would be like Philadelphia but worse, with various competing gangs violently competing over territory. And any coallition that became powerful enough suppress or unite them would be de-facto a government.
But I think the main distinction here between a good government and a gang-like government-like thing is something like Legitimacy. Which is hard to define perfectly objectively, but is related to the following:
1,) True Monopoly on violence.
If you have five different gangs trying to control the same area, making different rules and overlapping in territory, it's hard to say that any one of them is the true government. Or even one gang (or official government) makes rules but can't enforce them and other people run around doing whatever they want, then this detracts from the legitimacy of the supposed government.
2,) Consistency/Integrity/Honesty.
Laws and processes which are consistent and predictable are much easier to follow and create more order and stability relative to their cost. If someone has a 5% tax imposed on them for thirty years, they can plan around that. They can get a job to earn enough money, save enough, make businesses, that all factor this constant tax into account. If instead you have a dictator or gang that randomly smashes and loots businneses whenever they feel like it, or suddenly doubles taxes on whatever company or businesses they temporarily dislike, then it makes it much harder for citizens to plan ahead and feel secure investing in long-term projects. Similarly, if a new gang replaces the old one every 5 years and changes up all the rules, none of them is especially legitimate. It sort of accrues over time. Or a government which pretends to obey a certain set of rules but blatantly violates them is less legitimate than one which consistently follows its own rules.
3,) Consent of the governed.
This is probably the most important. Obviously, the highest score it would be possible to have on this would be to literally have people sign a social contract in which they agree to allow the government to rule over them in exchange for the government agreeing to various things. Most places don't do this (though I think some charter cities like Prospera are doing this). But we can still get some of this by considering hypothetical questions. Like, if you had a magic button that would cause the government to suddenly vanish, or be replaced by a random or average different government, and presented the button to random citizens, what percent of them would press it? Or, how badly would they want to press it, how much would they pay for the option to press it? How much would they pay to prevent the button from being pressed? A government which does not require the consent of the people because it's powerful enough to force its will on them, but nevertheless has their consent anyway, is more legitimate than one which only forces its will to great protest. Note that this does not require the government to be a Democracy, a Monarchy in which everyone agrees that the Monarch should rule them is still legitimate.
All of this is on a spectrum. No existing government is perfectly legitimate, and any individual who wields a nonzero amount of force could be considered by a tiny government with a tiny amount of legitimacy under this perspective. But usually you'll find one entity, which everyone considers to be "the government", which is orders of magnitude above all of the various gangs and cartels and forces within it. (In cases where there isn't one unique outlier, we call it a "civil war", and it tends to be a temporary arrangement until one faction wins.) Nevertheless, I would argue that governments with high legitimacy, according to this metric, tend to be significantly better, both morally and pragmatically for the people living under them. It is inevitable that someone is going to use force on someone. If you are counting gangs and cartels, then having no government at all is not an option, so pick the best you can. I'd much prefer it be a mostly legitimate government like the one I have now that wants to tax me my entire life rather than some gang with low legitimacy and low time-horizons such which would rather loot my corpse while they're still in power.
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