Living in Mexico here, the cartels in this country do indeed fight back against nation state adversaries (specifically the U.S government and the federal and state government forces of Mexico and its 30+ states where they operate) but the example of them as a model for just about any other organization is grotesquely mistaken. Here's why:
For one thing, they partly resist by paying immense amounts of money in bribes to government and police officials at all levels of the Mexican state apparatus, and in some cases even to lower-mid level officials of the U.S government close to the border. This is not a policy for staying under the radar or being effective at a reasonable cost (unless you're moving billions in drugs and kidnapping money)
Secondly, they depend to a large extent on a known capacity for incredibly psychotic, grotesque levels of violence to intimidate officials inside Mexico's chronically weak state institutions so that their activities can be left alone as much as possible. This requires a willingness to engage in violent criminality that few organizations in the world can match and it also involves the use of thousands of low-level foot soldiers armed to the teeth and recruited from immense pools of poverty-stricken populations (again, not applicable to many organizations or groups that just want to stay off the radar of nation state adversaries while doing their business.)
Thirdly, despite all the above, the cartels are indeed under constant attack either among each other or from state level actors in Mexico and with U.S government pressure. Consequently, their attrition rate is monstrously high, with thousands, yes thousands, of their members dying hideously bloody deaths each year in endless gun battles with authorities and rivals. This is only sustainable due to the recruiting factors of my second point above and it's certainly no model for successfully evading nation state actors. They don't evade them much, they just keep feeding more "disposable" lives to them while a small leadership more or less staves off its own eventual death by bullet or supermax prison.
As a final point, despite all of the above measures being in place, even the highly protected, wealthy leadership of these cartels eventually almost universally suffers its own extremely high attrition from state level actors: Seeing as how virtually every single major cartel boss that was running things a decade ago is now either dead or in prison, the long term prospects for any one of them are awful, despite all their money and localized power.
As a final additional note, we could summarize what I wrote above by stating that:
1. the cartels by no means stay safe from state level actors in their activities or protection of their operators. The contrary, they're fully in the eye of a never-ending storm. This means nearly constant, active, life-and-death threat for every single one of their members.
2. However, they do survive in an institutional sense, as organizations, but only because both their leadership structures and overall street-level manpower are apparently highly fungible. Small consolation that to any individual member of said cartels hoping to life a long, healthy life of crime while evading the law; knowing that leader or foot soldier, he or she can almost certainly look forward to a bloody death or prison existence within a decade or less, even if the organization he/she belongs to may indeed survive institutionally. Very few people seeking to build a wealth-seeking illegal organization while avoiding the state would want to emulate such an existence.
