In '97?
I met an al-Qaida guy in Panama City, Panama, in late 2000. I had just got out of Indonesia and headed to the local mosque for the heck of it since I knew my mosques, and sure enough, this bonafide member of al-Qaida was there, telling me about his mission to set up a madrassa in CHILE. He was an ex-Sandinista who had lost his other religion, communism, and had picked up Islamofascism as his substitute. Totally sick but true.
Yes, in 1997! Isn't that crazy? Most people hadn't even heard of Osama back then. But I knew exactly who he was even at the time. It made me very uncomfortable as an American tourist, because even in 1997 Osama was known to have been behind various bombings of Americans. Although lots of Americans didn't yet know his name, he was already a popular figure among the radical anti-American leftists of Mexico and Latin America. I guess they saw him as a revolutionary like Che. Needless to say, it didn't make me feel very welcome to walk through the streets of Mexico with peddlers hawking posters of somebody famous for having blown up Americans at the Khobar towers and other places.