This dissertation uses Michel Foucault s study of governmentality with the purpose of understanding the issue of international development and, more specifically, the Northeast Agreement that was signed in 1962 between the United Stated and Brazil. This agreement results from the convergence of two distinct development projects: Operation Northeast and the Alliance for Progress. The initial years of the Agreement, however, were characterized by a number of disagreements between the two agencies that were responsible for its implementation, the Superintendency for the Development of the Northeast (SUDENE) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Considering the notion that development is a dispositif of power and knowledge that refashions the way we think about the temporal limits of Modernity by placing the difference between autonomous (civilized) and dependent (barbarian) subjects in the context of the normalities and abnormalities that characterize any population, we assume the hypothesis that the discord between SUDENE and USAID represented a political dispute regarding the delimitation of categories that define the normal and abnormal cases of development. In this sense, it is also a dispute regarding the temporal limits of Modernity. The analysis and comparison of the different theories that guided Operation Northeast and the Alliance for Progress was necessary to indicate the main points of this dispute.