This volume contains the proceedings of LATIN '92, a theoretical computer science symposium (Latin American Theoretical Informatics) held in S o Paulo, Brazil in April 1992. LATIN is intended to be a comprehensive symposium in the theory of computing, but for this first meeting the following areas were chosen for preferential coverage: algorithms and data structures, automata and formal languages, computability and complexity theory, computational geometry, cryptography, parallel and distributed computation, symbolic and algebraic computation, and combinatorial and algebraic aspects of computer science. The volume includesfull versions of the invited papers by 11 distinguished guest lecturers as well as 32 contributed papers selected from 66 submissions from authors with affiliations in 26 countries.