The aim of this article is to analyse foreign capital and national development in the debate between Celso Furtado and Maria da Conceição Tavares between 1964 and 1982. To this end, it investigates how Furtado’s analytical radicalization, following the 1964 coup d’état in Brazil, enabled him to make a pioneering interpretation of the transnationalization of capital in Latin America and the Caribbean, despite Tavares’ criticism of his stagnationist thesis. Moreover, although Tavares was considered to have won the debate with Furtado, this study reveals how her approach failed to define the limits of peripheral industrialization when capital in the region was under foreign control.