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The Eugenia dysenterica DC., popularly known as cagaita, is a fruit tree belonging to Myrtaceae family, native to the Brazilian Cerrado. In general, its leaves are used as antidiarrheal as its fruits have laxative properties, according to popular use. However, in the literature, little has been reported concerning the chemical and biological activities of this plant. Preliminary analysis indicated the presence of catechin and epicatechin, catechin being the largest concentration. Thus, the present study aimed at the development and validation of an analytical method by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) for the determination of catechin in a standardized dry aqueous extract of E. dysenterica. The powdered plant material was extracted by infusion and then lyophilized for analysis by HPLC. The detection and quantification limits of catechin were 0.57 and 1.54 μg/mL, respectively. The proposed method has demonstrated good linearity with a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.9956. It has shown to be selective to detect catechin before degradation products generated by acidic and basic hydrolysis of the extract. For the used concentrations of 13.6, 17.0 and 20.4 μg/mL, the accuracy of the proposed method was 90.7, 98 and 97%, respectively. There was also robustness against flow rate, temperature and wavelength variations.