BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

  CARACAS - Opening peace talks with opponents following a failed military coup last week, President Hugo Chávez Thursday said he had ''sheathed my sword,'' then fired a couple of jabs at rich Venezuelans and the country's news organizations.

  Chávez, usually an incendiary orator, appeared much chastened at the first session of the Federal Government Council, created to start reconciliation talks and made up of lawmakers, state governors and city mayors from both pro-Chávez and opposition parties.

  ''I have sheathed my sword,'' he said, adding that he had also given away his paratroopers' uniform and red beret -- a fashion adopted by thousands of Chávez
  followers -- while he was under detention by the coup plotters.

  A former army lieutenant colonel who staged a failed coup in 1992 and was elected president six years later, Chávez had long angered military officers and projected a martial image by wearing his old uniform in public.

  But he also accused ''rancid economic sectors'' and the media of backing the coup attempt, and said he would listen to any opposition proposals only if they stayed
  within the 1999 Constitution, which he all but drafted.

  Meanwhile, a Caracas newspaper carried the third installment of a series identifying businessman Isaac Pérez Recao, 32, whose wealthy family has long done business with the Venezuelan military, as a key force behind the April 11 coup attempt.

  El Nuevo País has reported that Pérez Recao paid the defense lawyers' fees for military officers who spoke out against Chávez since last year and was the power behind Pedro Carmona, the business leader named interim president before Chávez returned to power.

  A family friend said Pérez Recao went into hiding and may have left the country. Calls to the family-controlled VENOCO conglomerate seeking reaction to the reports were not returned.

  The reports by El Nuevo País, whose owner Rafael Poleo joined other media leaders in several meetings with Cardona as the coup developed, created such a sensation that street peddlers were hawking photocopies for $2.

  Chávez's conciliatory tone since his return to power continued to draw skepticism Thursday from critics who have seen him back off when he was about to lose previous confrontations, only to return to his aggressive ways later.

  ''What you have to do is throw away that sword . . . Don't mention that sword ever again. Forget the sword'' because it implies a threat, said Poleo, who also publishes the news weekly Zeta.

  At the Government Council, opposition officials rose one after another to bitterly denounce Chávez as the cause of the political polarization that has kept the nation of 24 million on the brink of crisis for the past year.

  ''I see hatred,'' said Henrique Capriles, mayor of the Caracas district of Baruta.

  The National Council of Commerce and Services reported the widespread looting that accompanied the coup attempt had cost an estimated $226 million in damage and left 80,000 people jobless.

  Carmona, who is under house arrest, said in an open letter Thursday that he was not part of a coup conspiracy and served as interim president only after the
  commander-in-chief of the armed forces announced that Chávez had resigned.

  ''I did not take part in a coup, I have not conspired nor will conspire and I have not betrayed my deep democratic convictions,'' Carmona wrote.

  'I want to emphasize that I have a proven commitment to democracy, and that this image of a `Pinochet Lite' they're trying to put on me is totally false,'' he added in an interview published Thursday by a Caracas newspaper.