  Charge and color breaking minima in SUSY theories might make the standard
vacuum unstable. In this talk a brief review of this issue is performed. When a
complete analysis of all the potentially dangerous directions in the field
space of the theory is carried out, imposing that the standard vacuum should be
the global minimum, the corresponding constraints turn out to be very strong
and, in fact, there are extensive regions in the parameter space of soft
SUSY--breaking terms that become forbidden. For instance, in the context of the
MSSM with universal soft terms, this produces important bounds, not only on the
value of A, but also on the values of B, M and m. In specific SUSY scenarios,
as fixed point models, no-scale supergravity, gauge-mediated SUSY breaking and
superstrings, the charge and color breaking constraints are also very
important. For example, if the dilaton is the source of SUSY breaking in
four-dimensional superstrings, the whole parameter space (m_{3/2},B) is
excluded on these grounds. Cosmological analyses are also briefly reviewed.
