[1] She was, remembered The Times of London, "a courageous champion of civil rights who took on some of the world's most brutal dictators in her role as a senior American diplomat".

[9][10] She was quoted in documents in the National Security Archive openly accusing military leaders of torture of prisoners at a meeting in Argentina in 1977.

)[4] In December 2016, it was revealed that Derian eliminated her State Department files shortly before the January 20, 1981, inauguration of Ronald Reagan (who lampooned Derian, saying that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins" of the military despots before she criticized them) for fear that his political appointees "might share those names and their information with the oppressive foreign governments which would put her informants in greater peril".

[11] As the principal source of an October 1987 exposé published in The Nation, Derian revealed that in June 1976 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had secretly given a "green light" of approval to Argentina's new far-right military rulers for state terrorist policies against a purposely overblown left-wing guerrilla threat.

Ambassador to Argentina Robert C. Hill reported to her Kissinger's real role, "that with an imperial wave of his hand, an American could sentence people to death on the basis of a cheap whim.

As the senior State Department official in charge of human rights during my administration, Patt spent hundreds of hours meeting with victims and their families.

Because of her determination and effective advocacy, countless human rights and democracy activists survived that period, going on to plant the seeds of freedom in Latin America, Asia, and beyond.