Derian, who had headed an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights delegation in 1979 to investigate reports of widespread human rights abuses in Argentina, returned to Buenos Aires in 1985 to testify in the historic Trial of the Juntas. 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. An Argentinian journalist, Jacobo Timerman, who was tortured by the junta, credited Derian with saving him from execution. She supported Philippine leader Benigno Aquino Jr. and the South Korean dissident Kim Dae-jung. (When Kim was elected president she was invited as a special guest to his inauguration.) 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."