This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Latin-American Symposium on Dependable Computing, LADC 2003, held in Sao Paulo, Brazil in October 2003. The 21 revised full papers presented together with abstracts of invited talks, a panel, workshops, and tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation. The papers are organized in topical sections on fault injection, security, adaptive fault tolerance, distributed algorithms, and components and fault tolerance.