Mexican here, I just want to add something:
I think most people would say that the Mexican cartels are primarily criminals though. While they do kill people in ways that are intended to send a message, the message is generally "don't mess with our profits" rather than some political ideal.
This is rather naive, as they aren't just killing for profit or to protect their turf (the government usually goes with that narrative to not get involved, "just say the person had something illegal going and forget about it"), they actually control complete towns and obviously have people as slaves, they kill governors/politicians who might win elections or movements that go against their group and help gerrymandering during elections, among many other things.
They have a huge stake in politics to prevent things from getting better (specially during the past and current administration).
So... I'd say that from the moment they started to force the goverment at different levels, we could label them as terrorists.
In another time I might have hope of something finally being done after labeling them as such, but with president musk and the first lady trump... I can only expect the worse outcome.
Reminder the past administration dismantled the public vaccination program, instated a half-assed version that allowed them to pocket the money and gave control to the military, during covid they didn't want to apply vaccines until they were forced to, but only wanted to apply sputnik and cansino, until they were forced again to buy real ones, up to date and not expired ones (and that only lasted a while).
The current president (during her time as governor) experimented using ivermectin without the patient's consent, she gave her full support during the expresident's antivaxx crusade, she (now president) swore to keep the current system going and refuses to buy more covid vaccines, they are still applying outdated and (most likely) expired ones (sputnik and abdala), if you want to get one up to date, you have to pay around 900MXN and it's hard to find (already got mine but sheesh...).
The official mandate is to not talk about covid again on the media and the sick ones to be told they have atypical pneumonia or something, but the goverment swears the covid is no more.