This is quite a late answer, but I really liked the question so wanted to come back to it when I had time. The broader question of Francoist “justice” after the end of the war is both crucial and controversial to understanding post-civil war Spanish history, and it continues to inspire quite a bit of debate in contemporary Spain (and academia). There is no doubt that the Francoist state was repressive, particularly towards its political enemies, but how far did this repression spread? How genuine was Franco’s public position that his would be a government of reconciliation?

To start off, there is no question that for a large number of Republican soldiers and supporters, ‘getting out of Dodge’ seemed a quite sensible move in the final months of the war. For the most part, this option was open only to those in Catalonia, which had been cut off from the rest of Republican territory after Franco’s March 1938 Aragon offensive, but shared a border with France. Hundreds of thousands of refugees would cross this border in early 1939 after the Catalonian front collapsed, with French authorities allowing them to reach the relative safety of their territory, but interning them in massive camps on the south coast and North Africa. Some – notably many of the Republic’s political and intellectual leaders – managed to obtain passage to countries willing to accept them, most prominently Mexico where the exiled Republicans played quite an important political and intellectual role in subsequent decades. However, there were insufficient resources or places to accommodate the bulk of the refugees. Many were still there in 1940 after the French defeat at the hands of Hitler; some ended up in much worse camps in Germany and Poland, many others escaped and formed the backbone of the French Resistance in the south of France. Others – generally those who had ended up in camps in North Africa, which were liberated by the Allies in 1942 – joined Allied forces, usually the Free French. In fact, a Free French unit formed of ex-Republicans were the first Allied troops to enter Paris in 1944.

So, what was the alternative? It’s worth noting that the Francoist state, even before the war had ended, had started to take some rather bizarre steps to legally frame what had happened in July 1936. The Bellón Commission, founded in December 1938, was assembled with the express purpose not just of establishing the legality of the military rebellion, but ‘demonstrat[ing] clearly the illegitimacy of the current powers in the Spanish Republic in July 1936’ – in other words, that it was somehow the Spanish government, not the military, who were the illegitimate (indeed, rebellious) party at the outset of the civil war. The commission duly found that the Republican government was illegal and illegitimate, in fact had been since its founding in 1931, and in any case that the election results of February 1936 were faked. This, in the words of Julius Ruiz (hardly a left-wing historian), was a ‘travesty of the truth.’

This meant that supporters of the Republic could be – and often were – charged with the bizarrely inappropriate crime of ‘military rebellion’. Military courts were convened to try captured Republicans of this crime during the civil war itself, and this form of ‘justice’ would continue until as late as 1948, when martial law was finally suspended. The twisted logic of the new regime meant that, in theory, anyone who had lived in Republican territory was under suspicion of having aided the ‘rebellion’. So, while Franco’s announcement in early 1939 that the ‘terrible assassinations’ carried out by Republican authorities ‘should be avenged’ was not unexpected, the scale of Francoist vengeance was much wider than those who had been involved in Republican atrocities. By May 1940, over 40,000 former Republicans had been convicted of ‘rebellion’, carrying with it long jail terms or execution. This sentence could in turn be reduced (and the offender ‘redeemed’) by voluntary service to the nation – in other words, forced labour – most famously as part of Franco’s massive project to construct the ‘Valley of the Fallen’, the monumental memorial to the (Nationalist) civil war dead that still stands to this day.

This was hardly the extent of Francoist repression. The Law of Political Responsibilities, decreed in February 1939, was somehow even more hazily defined than the military justice system – it required that not just those who had opposed the regime pay a price, but all those who had, in some way, made the military uprising necessary. Alongside active measures such as execution, imprisonment and fines, there were wholesale purges of the workplace, civil service and professions of anyone who fell afoul of this sweeping law. Completing the repressive trifecta was the Law for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism, the ideologies/organisations Franco held most responsible for the Republic’s ‘ terrible atheist, materialistic, anti-militarist and anti-Spanish campaign.’ In all, the postwar years saw at least 50,000 executions and 280,000 imprisoned.

What does this mean for your hypothetical Republican veteran? It depends a great deal on their personal circumstances. If they had held any sort of military – or worse, political – rank, they would be in grave danger of prosecution for their ‘crime’. But this kind of active persecution is only the tip of the iceberg of Francoist repression – Spanish society was redesigned to punish those on the wrong side of the civil war. If they had been wounded, unless their families were in a position to support them – which might then put the family itself at risk – they faced a life of destitution and begging, with Republican veterans specifically excluded from receiving pensions or state support. They would have little chance of securing a high-status or well-paying job – 60,000 teachers, for instance, all had to prove their loyalty to be allowed to teach in schools under the new regime. Ex-Republicans were even banned from joining many sporting or leisure association. The sheer scale of this domestic, internalised repression is comparable – and in some ways even exceeds – that seen in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany prior to the Second World War. To my mind at least, ‘getting out of Dodge’ would have been a pretty smart move.

Sources

I’ve relied very heavily here on Julius Ruiz’s book, Franco's Justice: Repression in Madrid after the Spanish Civil War (Oxford, 2005). It’s worth noting that Ruiz is in some circles considered a Francoist apologist (unfairly to my mind), so his rather bleak assessment of the scale of Francoist repression is noteworthy. I’ve also borrowed a bit from an as-yet unpublished (but excellent) PhD thesis written by a friend of mine, Stephanie Wright, on disabled veterans in Francoist Spain.