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... while I'll generally agree with the 'stationary bandits' thesis, this isn't a great example. Even ignoring the elephant in the room of "livable" with a high (and very unpredictable!) murder rate, the Juarez half of the video focuses on the city center and downtown : while even this area was unsafe back in 2007-2012, today it's more comparable to Philadelphia midtown or at worst North Central. The Philadelphia portion looks to be shots from one of the slums in North Philly, maybe Glenwood area.
Juarez's slums tend to be less obviously messy, but you can still find a lot of spots with trash, graffiti, and unemployed affiliated citizens everywhere, along with a lack of businesses. And the difference in quality of homes is pretty huge! Moreover, that difference right now is kinda a best-case scenario; in 2010, something like a third of businesses in the city either moved out or closed down, with corresponding problems.
More broadly, a lot of Juarez' infrastructure and business appearance reflects tremendous injections of outside cash, largely under the theory that the cartels were able to hire so many expendable and trigger-happy troops due to the rampant poverty, rather than some specific and intentional behavior of the cartel. While a few of the nice buildings and clean streets are specifically due to gang actions (if more in the sense of the gangs liking their own buildings and streets looking nice), a lot of the improvements have reflected state or foreign national investment.
((On the flip side, yes, a lot of the violence came about because of either cartel-on-cartel or cartel-on-government actions. Albeit not all of it; during the height of the 2010-era violence and again with some of the more recent smaller surge, there's been a lot of what's pretty likely 'personal' motivations.))
It is hardly a new observation that non-governmental actors can sometimes exercise state functions. Just one subset of such actors has been the subject of voluminous research , and the argument that, in Europe at least, the state developed when violent actors sought to extract resources from the people under their control so they could continue fighting wars was first popularized in 1975 by Charles Tilly, and his 1982 article, Warmaking and Statemaking as Organized Crime, is required reading in pretty much every comparative politics course.
But to infer therefrom that there can be no distinction between a government and a cartel ignores differences in types of governments; in order to stay in power, the leaders of cartels and the leaders of non-democratic governments need only keep a small group happy, so they have incentives to provide relatively few public goods. Instead, they use the money extracted from the populace to provide spoils to members of that small group. In contrast, governments in democracies must provide public goods, because the number of people they must keep happy is so large. See here
PS: I second those who criticize your use of a video from who knows where, with obviously cherrypicked excerpts and your own dubious inferences therefrom*, and representing n=2, to make generalizations about what life is like under the two types of regimes.
*Eg, you say there is a lack of businesses in the Philadelphia neighborhood, but the video does not show the main thoroughfares of North Philadelphia.
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